Whose Green Transition? Exploring Just Transition Claims in EU Legal Mobilization

The climate crisis is, at its core, a crisis of inequality. This inequality manifests across multiple interrelated dimensions, from unequal responsibility for historical emissions, to unequal impacts of climate change between geographical regions and socio-economic groups, and questions about who will bear the greatest burdens of climate mitigation. This is the case, too, within the European Union. While the EU has the ambition to become the first climate-neutral continent, the details of how the green transition should be achieved and how mitigation burdens should be distributed remain highly contested. One of the ways that various actors attempt to challenge both the distributive and procedural inequalities in the context of EU climate policy is by invoking legal norms as a form of political mobilization, in a process commonly referred to as legal mobilization. Cases before the CJEU and the EU’s several semi-judicial mechanisms have addressed a great variety of issues, ranging from the overall ambition of the Union’s climate targets to the implementation of particular renewable energy projects, and their social impacts on local communities within the context of a just transition. However, literature on EU legal mobilization has to date not engaged much with questions of climate inequalities, and the growing body of research on “just transition litigation”. This paper therefore explores to what extent legal mobilization can be used by different actors to challenge inequalities arising in the context of EU energy transition policy. Using cases challenging the Critical Raw Materials Act and the Taxonomy Regulation as a comparative case study, it combines a docket analysis of EU-level cases with qualitative content analysis of case documents and interviews with claimants and campaigners. In doing so, it contributes important insights on which just transition claims are being advanced in legal mobilization at the EU level, how they are shaped by the particular legal framework available, and which actors (successfully) mobilize them to advance their particular visions of a just transition.