Matteo Mandelli – Obstacles and opportunities to achieving a just transition in Europe

Hi, I am Matteo Mandelli, I am Assistant Professor at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics, here at Sciences Po.

I got a PhD at the University of Milan and then I moved to Paris and to Sciences Po in 2023 where I was a postdoc.

I work in between social and environmental policy, on two areas. 
The first one is identifying and analysing public policy, eco-social policies in between these two fields.
And the second one is tracing the policymaking process with which these policies are adopted, implemented and constructed.

With my PhD research, I showed that climate policies around the end of the 2010s, when
the European Green Deal came to life, were the result of a negotiated consensus.
Basically, the advancement in climate policies that we had in that era was permitted by the
publication of social policies that would offset the negative risks that would come
with those climate policies, such as losses of jobs in carbon intensive industries, growing energy and transport poverty. So we had policies at the EU level like the Just Transition Fund and the Social Climate Fund.
And it was a negotiated consensus because these came as a deal between on the one hand
the advocates of the green transition and on the other hand the groups representing
the most at risk people.

In the latest development of my research, I have tried to focus on the current moment
in climate policies in Europe, which is a moment of so-called green backlash, where the social risks of the green transition are getting more and more politicised and we're seeing an attempt to dismantle a lot of the current policies. But my research is finding that these attempts are not always successful.

I'm eager to continue my research on environmental policy conflicts, digging deeper into who's winning and who's losing from the green transition as well as what are the lines of conflict between parties and main interest groups or bureaucracies on these matters.

I was already here as a postdoc, as I was saying, involved in a couple of projects on
eco-social risks and on climate backlash with people at the centre like Bruno Palier,
Charlotte Halpern and Tom Chevalier and others; and so I was really eager to continue
working with this wonderful group of researchers that is very interdisciplinary, very comparative, very empirical.

I have also been involved in Sciences Po in the AIRE community, which is a trans-laboratory and trans-disciplinary community of researchers interested in the environment at large. I am one of the co-founders of the Social-ecological transition initiative which really put the spotlight on this integration between the social and the environmental.
And in terms of teaching, I have been teaching at the School of Public Affairs two classes
at the intersection between welfare and climate and I'm going to teach a new class at the
climate school, the reading seminar, and from next year a bachelor level class on public policy.

It's always been very important for me that my research would travel outside of academia
and especially would inform the policy making world and the debates in there, especially
at the European Union level. So I did a lot of work over the years in Brussels in collaboration with a few key think tanks that were working on the just transition.
I've also worked with European institutions, at the moment I'm a member of the advisory
board of the European Fair Transition Observatory which is a new observatory within the European Commission. And I'm also one of the board members of the Eco Welfare Network that promotes different activities for researchers but also stakeholder engagement and dialogue.