Unpacking green and just transition policies: instruments and toolboxes

The need to simultaneously address ecological and social costs and risks of climate change has challenged the established welfare and green state regimes, requiring to coordinate policy strategies and individual policy instruments across a range of sectors. Along with the complexity of practical solutions that this task implies, a range of theoretical and conceptual issues arise for those who aim to map and understand these processes. The rapidly growing though still underdeveloped scholarly debate on eco-social transitions still lackks solid theoretical grounds, especially from the political science perspective, and much empirical research remains to be done to assess how and to what extent governments at the different territorial levels manage to cope with the multifaceted eco-social agenda. Building on public policy studies and, in particular, the criteria of policy density and intensity (Bauer and Knill, 2014; Knill et al., 2012) this paper provides a comparative analysis of environmental and social policy instruments in a group of Southern European countries (Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal) with the objective of mapping their evolution of the time (2008-2018) and spelling out the nature of the linkage existing between the ecological and social domains in the energy sector. In addition to presenting original empirical findings based on OECD and Eurostat datasets, the paper contributes to advancing the theoretical and conceptual framework that captures the so-called eco-social nexus, reflecting on the nature of interaction between the social and environmental components, which can be intertwined or develop in parallel bringing about mutually reinforcing or undermining dynamics.