The politics dimension of European eco-social policies: insights from the European Parliament

The on-going climate crisis, and the Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis have posed serious challenges to European policy-making and made evident the need for intertwined environmental and social policy responses. An example is the European Green Deal (EGD) launched in 2019 by the European Commission. The EGD has the double ambition of transforming the European Union (EU) into a “fair and prosperous society with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy” through a “socially just ecological transition” (European Commission 2019). Hence, this new European policy addresses both environmental and social aspects and considers them as interconnected and mutually reinforcing objectives. While recent European policies envisage and encourage an environmental and social nexus, studies on European welfare and environmental policies have often been limited to each policy area with a general lack of contributions theorising an intersection between the two policies. An attempt to facilitate a cross-fertilization between environmental and social policy studies was recently advanced by the emerging scholarly community publishing under the terms of “sustainable welfare” and “eco-social policies” to indicate a nexus between social and environmental aspects and an integration of these in policies. Theoretical contributions within this field have delved into the environmental challenges to welfare systems and the distributional repercussions of environmental and climate policies while empirical contributions have analysed public support for climate and welfare policies in Europe, examined selected European policies from an eco-social perspective and mapped the welfare and environmental performances of EU countries. However, both theoretical and empirical eco-social research generally lacks a reflection that can help identify and understand the political context and actors’ dynamics in the development of eco-social policies. This article aims to address the aforementioned research gaps and advance research on the dimensions of (eco-social) policy and of politics by answering the following questions: What is eco-social and which role plays the European Parliament in promoting and moving forward a European eco-social agenda? Advancing and deepening the understanding of the eco-social characteristics of European policies, the article will focus on the period 2019-2023 and analyse environmental and social (and eco-social, if any) policy initiatives in the European Parliament (presented and discussed in Committees and in plenary sessions) to assess the role of the European Parliament. The analysis will also provide insights on which political parties favour (or not) the eco-social agenda. References European Commission (2019) Communication from the Commission - The European Green Deal, COM (2019) 640 final, 11 December 2019.