Welfare States and the Green Transition: Towards an EU Eco‐Social Contract

ABSTRACT This article examines how climate change and climate‐related policies can destabilise the EU social contract. The article uses the welfare‐state lens that places social protection at the core of a feasible and legitimate green transition to understand this destabilisation. Climate change is understood as both an external stressor, through escalating physical impacts, and an internal disruptor, through mitigation and adaptation policies that reorder labour markets, household budgets and territorial development, thereby generating new social risks, distributive conflicts and constitutional pressures on EU governance and legitimacy. The analysis provided in this article distinguishes between (i) implementation gaps, by which the EU social contract fails to deliver on its own promises of security, prosperity, equity and solidarity and voice and participation under climate stress, and (ii) conceptual gaps, which explain how growth dependence, anthropocentrism, presentism and EU‐bounded justice make the current EU social contract ill‐suited to the climate challenge. In response, the article outlines how the EU eco‐social contract could be operationalised, shifting from growth‐dependent welfare to a resilient one and strengthening the Union's commitment of leaving no one behind through more robust, integrated social‐protection instruments that can buffer climate shocks while enabling fair structural change.