Deliverable 4.1 – Report on Western Balkans Just Green Transition Conceptualisation

The Western Balkans region is significantly impacted by climate change and pollution. Over the past decades, warming has accelerated, and throughout the 21st century, it is projected to be higher than the world average (Alfthan, B et.al, 2015). The observed changes in precipitation over the last few decades are less clear, but almost all climate models agree that the region's countries will experience a significant decrease in precipitation by the twenty-first century, accompanied by an increase in drought conditions and, thus, water availability. In the absence of adequate adaptation measures, key risks for the region arising from these hazards are manifested to a vast extent and include economic and livelihood losses, increased mortality and morbidity, decreased public safety, impaired ecosystem functioning and the loss of species, and decreased energy security due to water scarcity. Many of these impacts are not only future issues but also present-day concerns. While the Just Green Transition concept and approaches are embraced at a global level, the process towards this transition in the WBs is progressing at a very slow pace and little is done in regard to societal preparedness for JGT. The “transition” itself signals epochal change, and at the same time unfolds uncertain futures for the affected economies. In this context, the WB countries have long been in the loop of the post-socialism transition, what Smith et al. (2005) call a ‘purposive transition’, characterised by a deliberate goal pursued as of the outset of transformation, with an explicit set of societal expectations and drawing heavily on external resources, aid and political orientation. Confronting this, the green transition is equally purposive (Geels, 2011) for the Western Balkans, considering its embeddedness within the EU green agenda, the EU integration process, and the structural and technical weaknesses in the region which inhibit it from producing bottom-up niches of change. Petrov (2014) characterises the post-socialist purposive transition as ‘teleological’ for the CEE, with the regime change appearing as “purposeful, preordained, and therefore predictable, virtually unstoppable, and impelled by a future goal”, which serves as the “defined end of the transition process” (p.30). The contextual territorial factors, should be accounted for in the respective local and regional strategies. Carothers (2002, p.8) would call the latter “the underlying conditions … the economic level, political history, institutional legacies, ethnic make-up, sociocultural traditions, or other ‘structural’ features”, all of which are equally relevant and important in defining how this new transition would evolve within the Western Balkans region. These underlying factors correspond with the sociotechnical landscape in which regimes are set and change (transition), and count for the spatial structure of cities, economic growth and social factors, normative values and environmental problems, as well as potential disasters and political dynamics. In the Western Balkans, the underlying conditions, coupled with the fatigue from a stagnating process of EU integration, conflicting narratives, dominant-power politics, corrupted institutions, and huge territorial disparities, have produced an agony of ‘never-ending transition’, which suggests that resistance to change may be notably present for the green transitions as well. On a policy level, to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 the EU adopted a new growth strategy, called The European Green Deal, (COM (2019) 640 final), which among others requires amending and creating transformative regulations, directives and decisions focused on eight main elements. The EGD has laid forward a Green Agenda for the Western Balkans (GAWB), not only in terms of fulfilling the acquis conditions but also as an emergent need for societies to interact and cooperate in view of climate changes. Yet, Western Balkan countries still fall behind the EU in fighting, mitigating and adapting to climate change, lacking at the same time a holistic approach for transforming all relevant policies (national and regional) into climate-sensitive. A lack of general knowledge and awareness persists in the region, there are no studies on the impact of the limited JGT practices so far as well; and to date, no ex-ante assessment on the effects of future interventions is undertaken. On a methodological note, this document makes its first attempt in unravelling key theoretical concepts related to Just Green Transition, while provides at a same time a summary of Green Transition efforts in the WB to date, in the frame of the EU Green Deal and defines common key elements for the just and inclusive Green Transition of the WB. Additionally, it builds on two methodological processes undertaken in the frame of GreenFORCE: i) the mapping of policies and current initiatives in the WBs and ii) The co-design processes bringing together the discussion of various stakeholders on JGT in the region. To deepen the discussion and further the efforts towards the conceptualisation of JGT in WBs, a research case study approach is presented and introduced in the document. The need for these (5) JGT research cases, as proposed in the specific chapter fie below, stems directly from one of the specific objectives of GreenFORCE, which focuses on generating knowledge through carrying out exploratory and comparative research on JGT processes, policies, costs and impacts, and their relation to the spatial and regional setting in the WB. The research is an empirical effort in terms of observing the interrelation between just green transition and place specificity, with a particular focus in the Western Balkans as countries and as a region. The selection of cases (presented in detail below) does not intend to achieve full comparison between each other, rather aims to identify common elements at the regional level and list key aspects that could be used to formulate policy recommendations for each of the sectors addressed by the cases. Therefore, while no one unique research question could be formulated for all of the cases, all of them would seek to respond in varying degrees and through different sectorial and country perspectives to a set of questions which we identified based on the theoretical conceptualization. In this way, we hope not only to bring salient answers on the potential future impacts of green transitions in the Western Balkans societies but also shed light on the regime-landscape interaction and how such an interaction can vary depending on its spatiality. Finally, the research efforts aimed at identifying the endogenous potential for just green transition in the Western Balkan and contextual factors that define the related prospects and trajectories of innovation (Maassen, 2017), ensuring social justice