Historical and regional analyses of industrial transitions and their lessons for ensuring a fair green transition

Expected Outcome

Projects should contribute to all of the following expected outcomes:

• Provide policymakers with an analysis of past and present industrial transformations and what successful policies and measures were used to combat their negative externalities.
• Improve the understanding on the mechanisms of regional responses (e.g. geographic mobility of labour) and provide policymakers with a set of recommendations for seizing the opportunities and smoothing the risks of the developments. Analyse and evaluate forms of collaborative and participatory approaches to the management and governance of transition processes, including through social dialogue and collective bargaining.

Scope

The geographic variation in the impact of the European Green Deal is crucially important. Even though the green transition will have a positive impact and will improve our societies in many respects, regions with sizable employment in coal mining or traditional vehicle manufacturing will be disproportionately impacted. The resulting labour market imbalances can be addressed by people's movements within and between countries and training and skilling policies adapted to regional contexts.

The current economic system favours urbanisation, with jobs and skilled labour now concentrated in large urban areas. However, many jobs needed for the transition towards carbon neutrality are not in the most urbanised regions. Further still, green jobs will not automatically be created in regions with declining industries (such as coal mining, traditional vehicle manufacturing, or maritime transportation ports).

One important field of research should be on mechanisms of geographic mobility of labour (of EU citizens and third country nationals), incorporating a gender perspective to understand how mobility patterns differ and influence workforce dynamics. This is particularly pertinent given the documented impact of gender occupational segregation on labour market outcomes.

Another important research avenue is firm adaptation. Much of the current research is focused on the closing of factories and the subsequent reallocation of labour. However, the great challenge of the green transition is how to prevent existing businesses from closing and to upgrade them in a circular, cost- and resource-efficient manner, and make them more competitive. There is, therefore, a need to study cases of successful transitions that may not involve closing of factories and the policies and practices that enabled them.

Past transitions can provide insight into how to handle economic readjustment in regions strongly impacted by the green transformations. The success of the green and energy transitions hinges on political feasibility. Research is needed to understand what drives feasibility across contexts and how it can be strengthened. Past transitions have forced regions and communities to diversify their economic models. In this regard, they bear many similarities to the green transition.

To ensure Europe will benefit from current transitions, proposals should employ a whole ecosystem approach and draw from a rich variety of (SSH) disciplines including history, sociology, economics, and geography. Proposals may focus on policies which favoured local job creation, upskilling, labour mobility, and business model diversification. Proposals may also focus on the experiences of workers to provide adaptation lessons for the current transitions. Another research perspective could be the role social conflicts and compromises linked with social partners and how these have shaped past transitions. Lastly, proposals may take into account other key megatrends such as labour-saving technological innovation or demographic changes and evaluate how those change in the context of past and current industrial transformations, and how these impact different groups disproportionately.

Where applicable, proposals should leverage the data and services available through European Research Infrastructures federated under the European Open Science Cloud, as well as data from relevant Data Spaces. Particular efforts should be made to ensure that the data produced in the context of this topic is FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable).