THE POLITICS OF ECO-SOCIAL POLICIES: TOWARDS A JUST TRANSITION IN SPAIN AND IRELAND

Social and environmental challenges are deeply interconnected: it is indeed becoming increasingly evident how both climate change and green transition policies are giving rise to a new wave of social risk for the welfare state to address. Therefore, the so-called eco-social policies could represent suitable tools for the state to simultaneously pursue social and environmental goals in a synergic manner. This study concentrates on a particular type of eco-social policies, which are the ones designed to address the social consequences of decarbonisation and to achieve a just transition. Despite the importance that just transition policies could have in accompanying European countries’ net-zero transitions, these policies are not only still rarely diffused in reality but also undertheorized by political scientists, since the literature is currently dominated by prescriptive studies. Against this background, this Ph.D. thesis aims to contribute to the emerging debates about sustainable welfare and just transition by bringing in a so-far underdeveloped empirical-political perspective. Navigating a largely unexplored field, the thesis thus aspires to strengthen our analytical, theoretical and empirical understanding of just transition policies and related political dynamics. It does so, preliminarily, by proposing a novel conceptual-analytical framework; mapping existing just transition policies in European Union countries; and reflecting on the applicability of mainstream welfare state theories to potentially explain the emergence of just transition policies. Building on these preliminary insights, Spain and Ireland are selected as case studies for a comparison that aims to unveil the process culminating in the adoption and formulation of just transition policies in these two countries. The two cases are investigated through process tracing and qualitative methods, focusing on policy and politics analysis. In short, the thesis argues that national just transition policies are still relatively rare across the European Union and, with the notable exception of Spain, they are mostly formulated as narrow strategies, connected to investment-oriented instruments and to a governance that concentrates power in the hands of the government. The emergence of such policies can be explained as a result of a green-labour convergence among relevant socio-political actors engaging in political exchanges, with which political support for decarbonisation is traded for economic support to vulnerable societal groups.