Overall Objective
This policy session will focus on the crucial and policy-relevant challenge of enabling and advancing the just and equitable energy and digital transitions, in Europe and worldwide. The clean energy transition will involve firms, workers, households, and public bodies and will pose technical, economic, and political challenges. Furthermore, the parallel “twin” digital transition will involve the increased use of information and communication technologies across all social actors and can augment or diminish elements of the ecological transition. Enacting policies that enable a feasible and just energy transition in this context will require a comprehensive understanding of a wide set of socio-economic outcomes.
Last year, we organized an EAERE pre-conference workshop, focused on the Just Transition, in which we discussed issues related to employment, distributional impacts of policies, and public acceptance of the climate transition. The workshop was very well attended, with over 50 participants, testifying not only the importance of the topic but also the widespread interest in the EAERE community, including from young researchers. The aim of this policy session is to extend the discussion, showcase recent academic results, and describe the recent developments in the policy debate. Leading academics and practitioners will discuss how the EAERE community can best contribute to advance and support the development of Just Transition narratives, to overcome the obstacles surrounding the energy and digital Just Transitions, and to identify effective, equitable, and actively supported policy interventions. This will result in a better understanding of the various dimensions of justice and their interlinkages and will highlight the main challenges in the quantification of their interaction and tradeoffs, as well as on the identification of impacts on all stakeholders.
Detailed description: The session will enable a deeper understanding of the challenges and drivers of the design and implementation of effective, politically feasible, and equitable decarbonization policies in the context of the energy and digital transition. It is organized as a roundtable dialogue among practitioners representing a wide set of stakeholders and academics from a wide variety of research backgrounds and methodological approaches. The chair of the session will provide guiding questions, with the aim of highlighting recent events and policy developments – particularly the COVID19 pandemic, the recent energy crisis, the Just Transition Fund and Just Transition Mechanisms within the broader context of the European Green Deal – the latest relevant research results, and fruitful avenues of research co-design among Just Transition experts.
Policy Session 11 – 29 June 2023 (14.30-16.15 EEST Cyprus, UCT+3)
Panelists:
- Massimo Tavoni (CMCC Foundation, RFF–CMCC European Institute on Economics and the Environment)
- Ioana Petrescu (Pur si Simplu Verde)
- Jan Steckel (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change)
- Karin Küblböck (Austrian Foundation for Development Research)
- Marion Dumas (London School of Economics)
