Social Impacts of the Green Transition: Prospective Environmental (In)Justice in Europe’s Peripheries
Abstract
The green transition is increasingly perceived as unjust by various stakeholders. Academic debates revolve around decarbonisation and coal phase-out legislation, the rush for critical minerals, new forms of renewable energy, regional strategies and the lack of effective coordination mechanisms, and policy gaps between economic and workforce development strategies and socio-ecological protections. Based on six case studies carried out between 2023 and 2025, this article identifies future vulnerabilities arising from the reproduction of intersectional socio-environmental inequalities in the EU’s just transition, thereby expanding the frame of socio-environmental justice (SEJ) through the lens of prospective environmental justice (PEJ). By centring analysis on the prospective production of SEJ and creation of green sacrifice zones, PEJ encourages scholarship and policy to confront the cross-sectoral and structural inequalities that green transition policies, as expressions of green capitalism, often inherit and amplify. We address a gap in comparative studies that empirically and qualitatively engage with the grassroots effects of the transition in Southern and Eastern Europe, discussing its structural conditions and evidencing place-based lived experiences. This article contributes to mapping prospective (re)vulnerabilisation in Europe’s green/just transition and the making of green sacrifice zones, wherein certain groups, identities, lands, and livelihoods are precast as dispensable in the pursuit of climate goals. Our contribution builds understanding of what it means to be made vulnerable in the technocratic shadow of the green transition in Europe’s periphery.