*article reposted from https://bolster-horizon.eu/the-just-transition-fund-can-do-more-good-with-a-place-based-approach/*
This article is based on the research findings of BOLSTER: a Horizon project that aims to understand how marginalized communities are affected by EGD-related policies and whether involving them in decision-making processes increases the support for transition plans. The project actively engaged local communities in future visioning exercises and discussions about the Just Transition in their regions.
When the Just Transition Mechanism was conceived at the EU level, it was structured in a way that could give voice to regional particularities and local preferences. The main instrument for that was the region-based Territorial Just Transition Plan. This approach understood that while carbon-intensive industries are part of global political economies, they create spatialized experiences for people. A community around an oil extraction or waste disposal site will rely on different resources to adapt to the green transition compared to an oil processing area or a transport and logistics hub. Regions, cities, and neighborhoods will have their own specific experiences of industrial pollution, growth, or withdrawal.
A place-based Just Transition Mechanism presents two opportunities. First, it counters the risk that the JTM will be perceived as an abstract European concept or just another financial instrument. Second, it can invite people to reflect on their needs, fears, and visions for transformation and respond to them with relevant policies. But looking at the implementation of the JTM in Romania so far, we notice that policies distance themselves from the places they are supposed to influence.
At least in Prahova County, when the Territorial Just Transition Plan was formulated, decision-makers who led the process showed a lack of political will to invite citizens – and particularly marginalized groups – to the consultation table, side-lining a lot of their concrete concerns and needs. This is where a first fracture emerged. While the local leaders considered „all relevant stakeholders were involved in the process”, as a Prahova County representative declared in an interview, the elaboration of the TJTP was only made, in practice, by the „usual suspects”, failing to include in the process smaller actors such as non-governmental organizations, small local authorities, not to mention citizens and representatives of marginalized groups.
The second fracture comes from the central level authorities in charge of distributing funds; At least as things have been going so far, they opted for a one-size-fits-all approach that blocked regions’ abilities to tailor their actions according to the threats to justice prevalent at the local level. To roll out the Just Transition Fund in Romania, the Ministry of European Projects and Investments took all the regional TJTPs into consideration to inform the calls for proposals financed by the Just Transition Fund. The Intermediary bodies – regional-level authorities – were in charge of receiving and evaluating proposals from applicants. But, so far, all six transition regions had to spend the money in a single way: investments in small and medium-sized enterprises.
As of October 2024, the only functional call launched by MIPE as part of the Just Transition Fund was dedicated to developing SMEs. Since Romania’s Just Transition Plan was approved by the EU Commission in 2022, national authorities opened this one call and announced the intention to launch two others – one line dedicated to micro-enterprises and the other to County Employment Agencies for workforce reskilling actions. Since there are only three years left to launch, select and implement said calls, it’s likely that the proposals will be implemented in a rush and it will be challenging for them to achieve the desired impact. Initially, the JTP and the prospective funding allocation approved by the EC looked at a wider diversity of themes, many of which had a spatial angle– e.g., green mobility, rehabilitation of abandoned sites, or decontamination. But these themes seem to have been dropped off along the way. The publicly available information doesn’t give any indication that the funding will be used in other directions besides the three lines announced (SMEs, microenterprises, and employment agencies) – that is if the pending calls become operational in due time.
While people are indeed at risk of losing jobs as carbon-intensive industries are meant to reform or downscale their operations, the business-oriented approach of the JTF presents a very narrow vision of what communities need to do in order to become resilient in the face of a transition. Most importantly, it doesn’t allow regions to target local priorities through a mix of projects and areas of action, even if they identified these diverse needs in their TJTPs. We compared the aims presented in TJTPs with the grant contracts that were signed and the activities they promised.
To give an example, the region of Hunedoara wants to intervene on energy poverty, which affects 70% of its population in winter. Local experts who contributed to the TJTP noted that they need to progress in spatializing energy poverty because it’s not only an issue depending on incomes; it’s also about which homes have a gas connection, where are poorly insulated homes concentrated, or who has vulnerable household members. They prioritized investments in energy communities, solar roofs, household-level green energy sources, small capacity production, transport and storage facilities for renewable energy, and investments in energy efficiency. All these measures are ineligible in the funding plan currently announced.
Galați, a large steel and naval region, had an economic restructuring strategy in mind: to keep its water-based industry alive by decarbonizing water transport and its port operations. Among the prospected actions, the Galați JTTP prioritized investments in green energy supply, shipbuilding electric or green vessels, retraining workers at risk of marginalization, and supporting the digital economy through digital innovation centers. So far, however, only 5 projects have been funded for investments in SMEs, most of them in rural areas. For example, a metal works company will upgrade its machinery, a real estate development company was financed to build more units, an abattoir will buy more equipment to diversify its production, and two small factories will extend their operations. Except one factory in a rural area that will generate 71 new jobs, the other 4 grantees will create an average of 5 jobs each, according to the public access information available to this date. These investments seem to bypass the core of the problem that made the county a JT region in the first place- that thousands of jobs in Galați are dependent on the heavily polluting port and steel works in the city of Galați. The current funding structure avoids the large polluting areas, doesn’t target impactful investments in new jobs, and sidelines what could have been a spatialized strategy that targeted the naval port – the buzzing core of economic activity, goods, services, and people.
In Prahova, where we carried out our in-depth research, the funding allocation was also extremely limited in scope compared to the regional strategy or local needs. After more than 100 years of history in petrol exploitation and processing, Prahova has numerous contaminated sites, sometimes right in the heart of cities. These sites affect natural ecosystems, the urban fabric, and people’s health. A representative of a local authority where such contaminated areas exist explained with frustration that while they lobbied for decontamination measures to be eligible for funding, they were told it was not going to happen. According to the latest public access data, JTF money in Prahova was directed towards equipping dentistry cabinets, building villas for the tourism circuit, and other similar actions.
As in the other regions, we notice a potential misalignment between the strategic goal of the JTF and TJTPS- which is to provide opportunities so that regions navigate the transition without leaving anyone behind, particularly marginalized groups- and the distribution of these funds in areas with low impact in terms of employment, greening and decontamination, quality of life, or providing a future direction for the region.
This investment approach is based on a trickle-down approach, whereby if more businesses in the area grow, it might translate into future profits and employment. But it misses out on the opportunity to address the nodes of inequality and their riskiest effects for people.
When we started engaging citizens in interviews and focus groups for the BOLSTER project, the visions they had in mind for a green transition looked a lot like a local development policy. It makes sense that the two are tied together. When people think about the transition prompted by the Green Deal, it builds on top of a pre-existing transition they lived through two to three decades ago. The post-socialist economic transition changed not only where they worked, but also where they lived and how they spent their time. They experienced that shift not only as a change in the job market, but also as a transformation of their cities – of services, transport, community, and vitality. In its retreat, the oil and gas industry left behind skeletons that affect the urban tissue to this day – abandoned factories, derelict buildings, and contaminated lands. If you engage citizen groups in discussions, they bring forward very clear, spatialized, proposals- what land plots need urgent decontamination, what facilities need reopening, how quality of life should be improved, which transit routes need to be connected, who is most vulnerable economically. This is a very rich informational terrain for decision-makers who want to formulate a responsive and locally relevant plan for a green transition without detrimental socio-economic effects.
A local, place-based perspective gives us insight into how people live through a transition and how we could do it better so that it reduces the associated human cost. But the relationship between place and policy was fractured on two levels: first, between locals and decision-makers at the regional level, and second, between regions and central authorities. On the one hand, complex spatial issues and citizen concerns didn’t become a policy focus because of closed-door consultation processes – particularly in the region we studied, Prahova. The “just transition” as a concept was not translated and mediated at the local level so that people perceive it as something that concerns them, nor were they actually invited to the conversation table. From the central level, the evaluation and quality-check procedures seem insufficient to ensure that regions carry out an inclusive participatory process and that they choose projects with a real impact on a region’s transition.
On the other hand, a one-size-fits-all solution catered mainly to the private sector, and especially to established enterprises, ended up restricting regions’ abilities to build and invest in comprehensive, long-term strategies for a post-carbon future. While regional decision-makers had a say in how the JTM was shaped in Romania – through consultations and observations- it doesn’t look like they had real power. The decentralization process meant engaging in dialogue, but not taking the decisions. The risk of this approach is that the JTF will have a diluted effect, that bolsters a small number of businesses with no major effects on a sustainable socio-economic transformation.
We argue that for a just transition to happen and for EGD policies to be met without resistance, we should not uncouple the JT framework from complex actions in the places that concentrate inequalities, and where the social, economic, and environmental effects of polluting economies are most intense. This would require a more place-based approach, that actually translates into actionable, locally-tailored investments, coupled with the local needs. Moreover, regions should be supported with strong assistance, monitoring and evaluation procedures, and a timely roll-out of projects, so they can make their own decisions about how a just transition might come to be.
author: Alexandra Lulache
