The Just Transition Fund: Local stakes in French, Swedish and Portuguese carbon-intensive territories

Anna Luise Büttner, Marion Beaudoin, Laure Lavigne Delville, Lucie de Rivas, Zoé Foulon et Max Tscheltzoff, students of the Master Governing Ecological Transitions in European Cities, made a group project with the European Commission’s DG REGIO in the framework of the Just Transition Mechanism launched in 2020. Discover their work.

The project aimed at identifying key elements for successful territorial strategies for economic and social reconversion of highly carbon-intensive regions in Europe. Therefore, in-depth studies were conducted on selected territories, where the objective was to analyze local conditions for the transition and different actors’ positions and interactions in the governance framework.

The issue of transitioning carbon-dependent territories is at the heart of the European Green Deal strategy aiming towards carbon neutrality by 2050. The Just Transition Mechanism (JTM), with three different pillars, is a means to provide social support for ambitious climate objectives to ensure that “no one is left behind”. This study concentrates on the first pillar - the Just Transition Fund (JTF) - and its implementation, focusing on objectives of economic diversification and workers’ reconversion: some European territories will be subject to closures or conversions of carbon- dependent industries, which will have considerable social and economic consequences. The question of identifying the main challenges for transition policies and governance is central in this regard.

The objective of this final report is to highlight the extent to which territories across France (Nord and Bouches-du-Rhône), Portugal (Matosinhos) and Sweden (Norrbotten) can make use of the JTF for their transitions. Exploring the position of the different actors who are, or could be, involved in the implementation of the fund, the report evaluates what factors of local context and governance determine the realization of the transition. After presenting the contexts of the four studied territories, a first part will discuss the very contrasting local situations, in which the JTF is inserted. A second part analyzes how the Just Transition concept, and therefore the use of the funds, is “translated” within these local contexts. The last part highlights challenges around the governance and role sharing in local implementations of the fund. The report concludes with recommendations for DG REGIO that emerged from the analysis of the four territories and which might be helpful for the further implementation of the JTF or similar funds in the future.

Read the report