This article is based on the research findings of BOLSTER: a Horizon project that aims to understand how marginalised communities are affected by the European Green Deal 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 (JTM) 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 spatialised 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 – and it will be very different compared to a mining or steel area. Regions, cities, and neighbourhoods 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. We followed how the mechanism is organised at the level of the central government authority and then in relation to Prahova, one of the country’s six eligible just transition regions. We relied on interviews taken throughout 2023 and 2024 with local authorities, regional and national stakeholders, and the information communicated publicly by implementing authorities.
There might be significant variations across counties, but at least in Prahova County, when the Territorial Just Transition Plan was formulated in 2021-2022, decision-makers who led the process showed a lack of political will to invite citizens – and particularly marginalised groups – to the consultation table. The effect was that a lot of their concrete concerns and needs were side-lined. 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 with us, 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. National authorities 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 – are in charge of receiving and evaluating proposals from applicants. But two years into programme implementation and after numerous delays, the six transition regions were able to attract funding solely for investments in small and medium-sized enterprises. And even there, the evaluation process is progressing very slowly since the call for projects ended in mid-May 2024.
As of October 2024, the calls launched by the Ministry of European Projects and Investments as part of the Just Transition Fund were dedicated to developing small and medium-sized enterprises and building the capacity of the public employment agencies (AJOFM). Since Romania’s Just Transition Plan was approved by the EU Commission in 2022, national authorities only launched these two calls -and the latter became active only on 10 October 2024. Since there are only three years left to launch the remaining calls and contract projects, it’s likely that the proposals will be implemented in a rush, hampering their capacity to achieve the desired impact.
In theory, the JTP and the prospective funding allocation approved by the European Commission addresses at a wider diversity of themes, many of which had a spatial angle– such as green mobility, rehabilitation of abandoned sites, decontamination or energy poverty. But these themes seem to have been neglected along the way. The information made publicly on the Romanian management authority’s communication channels doesn’t give a reliable indication on whether or when the funding will extend in these other directions. Even if spatial interventions will be addressed by additional calls, carrying them out impactfully will be very difficult in the limited timeframe that is left.
A project dealing with oil decontamination, for example, requires plenty of time. It needs to carry out feasibility studies, to find the right contractors, and to begin a lengthy and unpredictable process to clean up large swathes of land. Decontamination is expensive, and if a second Just Transition Fund isn’t guaranteed, it will be very risky for local administrations to begin a process that they won’t have the time and money to finish. Second of all, the local administrations we discussed with ask themselves: why should they be responsible for such interventions in the first place? In Prahova, a majority of the industry has been privatised and public authorities have no ownership over the land nor a mandate to enact regeneration projects, a matter which they signalled in conversations with the management authority. But from what we know so far, private companies will be ineligible to apply to this strand of just transition funding.
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 Just Transition Fund 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 per cent 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 the energy source of each household, 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. However, only a few of these actions are eligible for funding in the current program.
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 TJTP prioritised investments in green energy supply, shipbuilding electric or green vessels, retraining workers at risk of marginalization, and supporting the digital economy through digital innovation centres. By October 2024, however, only 5 projects have been funded for investments in small and medium sized enterprises, 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 these funds might bypass them completely.
As described earlier in this text, if the calls for projects do become operational in due time, it’s likely that they won’t be directed at the entities that actually have the ability and authority to regenerate and clean post-industrial sites. Instead, according to the public access data available in December 2024, the Just Transition Fund money in Prahova was directed towards equipping dentistry cabinets, building villas for the tourism circuit, expanding hotels and other similar actions.
As in the other regions, we notice a potential misalignment between the strategic goal of the Just Transition Fund and TJTPs- which is to provide opportunities so that regions navigate the transition without leaving anyone behind, particularly marginalised 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 European 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, spatialised 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 regional level, and second, between regions and central authorities. On one hand, complex spatial issues and citizen concerns didn’t become a policy focus because of closed-doors 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 decentralisation process meant engaging in dialogue but not taking the decisions. The risk of this approach is that the Just Transition Fund 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 European Green Deal policies to be met without resistance, we should not uncouple the just transition 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.