Partecipanti:

Matteo Bassoli

Milena Buchs

Eleonora Di Maria

Igor Guardiancich

Matteo Jessoula

Arturo Lorenzoni

Jale Tosun

Katharina Zimmermann

Anthony Zito

Principal investigator:

Ekaterina Domorenok

Abstract:

The question how ecological and social objectives can be balanced has nourished the burgeoning academic and political debate in the field of climate policies and politics. While extant literature has extensively addressed normative issues pertaining to potential tensions and trade-offs between the social and environmental dimensions of sustainability, limited knowledge exists on political and practical problems that policy mixes aimed at simultaneously tackling ecological and social problems may entail. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the project investigates how social and environmental priorities have been integrated at the level of policy instruments in EU countries over the last decade in order to understand: how the number, target and scope of environmental policy instruments have changed over time; ii) in what way has the linkage between the social and environmental domains materialised across individual policy instruments; iii) to what extent political factors and the consolidated national patterns of welfare and green policies shape the newly established eco-social polices and instruments.
The proposed research programme relies on the support and high-level expertise of an international team of renown scholars which have long been involved in the research on environmental and social policies in Europe.

Obiettivi:

The project sets out to improve our understanding of how ecological transitions can be delivered by focusing on a range of concrete policy instruments that governments deploy in order to address multiple social and environmental challenges across different sectors.
More specifically, the project activities:
1) Contribute to advancing the theoretical and conceptual framework that captures the nature and the practical challenges of eco-social policies.
2) Provide a systematic and fine-grained overview of a sample of policy instruments underlying eco-social policies with the purpose of identifying potential synergies, tensions and trade-offs.
3) Design and test an original methodology based on a mixed method approach in order to trace mutual impacts between the ecological and social domains within individual instruments.
4) Collect comparative empirical data to inform policy-makers on the challenges related to the eco-social policy mix.
5) Improve the understanding of the political dynamics around the eco-social domain in EU countries.

Piano delle attività:

The research activities are organised in two steps.
During the first year, a comprehensive review of the academic literature and policy documents on eco-social policies will be carried out and the theoretical framework of reference to be used throughout the project activities will be refined.
Subsequently, drawing on a dedicated novel mixed methodology and building on the available policy-relevant sources of data (Eurostat/OECD), a database of existing environmental and social instruments will be created with the purpose of mapping and understanding the nature of the eco-social policy mix in EU countries during the period 2008-2018.
During the second year, an in-depth qualitative alalysis of the instruments included in the dataset will be carried out, focusing on five national cases (Italy, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Sweden). Then, more recent policy developments covering the period 2019-2021 will be analysed from a twofold policy-politics perspective. In addition to delivering a nuanced view of the evolution of selected policy instruments, including those introduced to implement the European Green Deal, the research will investigate the political factors that have shaped policy dynamics in the five countries.