National eco-social policies in the framework of EU just transition: The cases of Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain

This article examines two questions. First, how far have the green and social policy objectives of the European Green Deal and the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) been translated into ‘eco-social policies’ (i.e. demonstrate a ‘socio-ecological’ dimension) in the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) of four of the biggest beneficiary countries, namely, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain? And, second, how is the role of national welfare states articulated in these eco-social policies to support this just green transition? Our analysis shows first, that, although the analysed NRRPs have a socio-ecological dimension, this is very limited in terms of the share of ‘eco-social’ measures in the total number of policy measures in the NRRPs. Moreover, we find that the role of national welfare states in the identified eco-social policies of the NRRPs in the four country-cases we examine is significantly tilted in favour of what we call ‘benchmarking’ and ‘enabling’ functions, in contrast to what we call ‘buffering’ and ‘consensus-building’ functions. In that sense, the socio-ecological dimension of these national plans seems ‘unbalanced’ in terms of the functions that national welfare states play in it. The article concludes with some reflections on the implications of these findings for the role of EU policy legacies and frameworks and of national welfare states in shaping the emergence of eco-social policies as means to a just green transition and on some methodological challenges for the study of eco-social policies in the context of the European Green Deal and its implementation.