ABSTRACT
Climate change policy has long been a priority for the EU. The von der Leyen Commission strengthened this role by adopting in 2019 the European Green Deal (EGD), a reform agenda aimed at achieving climate neutrality by 2050. Central to the EGD is the principle of ‘just transition’, which seeks to alleviate some of the adverse social consequences of climate action. To this end, the EU introduced the Just Transition Fund (JTF) and the Social Climate Fund (SCF). The JTF assists regions heavily affected by the shift to a low-carbon economy, while the SCF protects vulnerable households, microenterprises and transport users from the consequences of the extension of the EU’s cap-and-trade-system to buildings and road transport. Drawing on policy documents, media reporting and 14 elite interviews, this chapter analyses the design of the SCF and the JTF while focusing on the politics of their establishment. It argues that the creation of both instruments is explained by the political necessity to ensure the buy-in of numerous actors to the EGD. In this process, the strategic task of the Commission was crucial in disarticulating the opposition of eastern European Member States to ambitious climate action by isolating the most reluctant of them, namely Poland.
