The Puzzle of Just Transition: Climate Governance Paradigms and Policy Bricolage in the European Union

From its inception, the policy agenda of the European Green Deal (EGD) has incorporated chapters on ‘just transition’. The EGD builds on the green growth paradigm of climate governance and constitutes the new official growth model of the European Union (EU). This paradigm, which dominates technocratic discourses on climate mitigation, is grounded in the possibility of transcending trade-offs among social protection, economic growth, and environmental protection. Claims for just transition, however, derive from a different construction of the climate crisis, according to which trade-offs cannot be resolved by technocratic means, and require profound socioeconomic transformation. The two paradigms thus build on incommensurable sets of beliefs regarding the politics of climate. Yet, we observe the coexistence at the EU level of policies and discourses both on ‘green growth’ and ‘just transition’. How do different paradigms of climate governance interact and produce common policy goals? Building on the notion of policy bricolage, the analysis traces how just transition frames penetrated the EU climate policy agenda. This is done through a combination of policy document analysis and semi-structured interviews with Brussels-based policy actors, within and outside the EU institutions. The paper contributes to our understanding of policy influence and compromise in climate governance