Speaker
Description
This contribution builds on the recent report Building Social-Ecological Protection for Belgium to address the institutional dimension of a just transition towards climate neutrality. The report highlights that the most persistent barriers are not primarily financial or technical, but institutional. In federal contexts such as Belgium, competences relevant to social protection, labour, and environmental policy are fragmented across multiple levels of government. This fragmentation generates coordination gaps, overlapping responsibilities, and political stalemates that weaken citizens’ protection against ecological risks such as heatwaves, pandemics, or resource scarcity. At the European level, ecological concerns remain insufficiently embedded in the social acquis, leaving social protection systems ill-equipped to confront climate disruptions.
Yet these vulnerabilities also suggest possible strategies. For instance, anchoring ecological sustainability explicitly within European social rights would strengthen the legitimacy and resilience of welfare systems. Improving intergovernmental cooperation mechanisms in federal states could reduce institutional deadlocks and foster more robust responses to crises. Participatory foresight and scenario exercises can provide a democratic basis for reform, creating shared visions and enhancing trust in public institutions.
By mapping these institutional barriers and strategies, the intervention aims to open a discussion on how to reconfigure governance frameworks so that they become enablers, rather than obstacles, of a just transition. Belgium’s experience offers a laboratory for exploring how federal complexity, when properly managed, can be transformed from a source of vulnerability into a resource for institutional innovation.
| If your abstract is not accepted for an oral presentation, would you be interested in presenting it as a poster instead? | No |
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| If accepted by the Scientific Board, I agree to have my presentation/poster and abstract published on the Belgian Climate Centre websites and social media. | Yes |
