Varieties of Eco-Social Policies in Southern Welfare States: the Cases of Greece and Italy

This paper explores differences in the mix of eco-social policies emerging in Southern European member states in the context of EU financial instruments aiming at implementing the European Green Deal. Previous work (Theodoropoulou et al. 2024) suggested that the mix of eco-social policies where the welfare state plays an enabling role focusing on social investment in skills (or in the mix of ‘preventive eco- social investment policies’ in Mandelli’s (2022) terminology) in the four ‘southern welfare states’ has varied across the different types of social investment (pertaining to skills creation, mobilisation and preservation) proposed by Garritzmann et al. (2023). This in turn opens questions on whether the politicisation of social investment policies differs in the context of the climate emergency and green transition and the new social risks they are associated with (Mandelli et al. 2024). The paper expands and focuses the analysis in two ways. First, it investigates the emergence of eco-social policies beyond the national Recovery and Resilience Plans to Territorial Just Transition Plans, as the latter illustrate how member states go about implementing the Just Transition Fund, one of the main EU social policy instruments related to the social consequences of the European Green Deal (Zimmermann and Gengnagel 2023). The aim of this extension is to obtain a fuller picture of the content and prevalence of preventive eco-social investment policies with a skills focus. Secondly, after comparing the prevalence of preventive eco-social investment policies and their typology in Greece and Italy, the paper explores possible factors for any differences between the two countries. Evidence from the national Recovery and Resilience Plans suggests that the two countries put forward different mix of social investment (eco-social) policies (Theodoropoulou et al 2024). This disparity, if confirmed in the Territorial Just Transition Plans, is puzzling, as the two countries, both great beneficiaries of EGD related financial instruments, had similarly poor records in social investment strategies and shared explanatory political factors (cf. Beramendi et al. 2015; Garritzmann et al. 2024). More recent work also suggested that Italy had been constrained in its social investment by financial constraints shaped by EU economic governance frameworks (Ronchi and Vesan 2022) (as was Greece), whereas Greece seems to have been taking advantage, at least at a programmatic level, to promote such policies in its RRP despite its centre-right government. The paper would contribute to the emerging literature on what shapes the varieties of green transition (cf. Zimmermann 2023) and how social risks related to the climate change and green transition are politicised (cf. Mandelli et al. 2024) but also on the more long-standing themes of how EU policy frameworks shape national social policies (cf. De la Porte and Madama 2024).