OAFP 9495 - Between Welfare and Climate: the Politics of Eco-social Policymaking

As the ecological crisis intensifies and governments across the world race to advance on a green

transition, new social risks are rapidly emerging, including extreme weather events that damage

assets and livelihoods, job losses in decarbonizing industries, and rising energy and transport poverty.

These challenges highlight the growing need to integrate welfare and environmental institutions

through so-called eco-social policies, public policies that aim to prevent or compensate for these new

risks through measures like public services or income support. This course explores how eco-social

policies take shape within the democratic policymaking process. It starts from the context of growing

risks and then examines how citizens’ attitudes and voting behaviours influence policy choices.

Afterwards, it sheds a light on how institutional legacies (namely eco state and welfare state

regimes) can constrain or enable policy changes, as well as on how actors (particularly political

parties and organized interest groups) conflict and cooperate to advance their preferences. The

course aims to equip students with a comprehensive understanding of the policymaking process in

this emerging field of public policy. It does so by building a bridge between classic theories of welfare

state and environmental governance, while also engaging with concrete cases of eco-social

policymaking in Europe coming from the literature and from the experience of policymakers who will

be invited to discuss with the class.

Students should be familiar with the fundamentals of policy-making and comparative politics before

taking this class. Preliminary knowledge of welfare state theories, environmental policy, and

European Union (EU) studies will be helpful, though not strictly required.

The course will begin with a series of introductory lectures to unpack the key dimensions of eco-social

policymaking. These sessions will be highly interactive, combining short inputs from the instructor

with group discussions of the readings and guided conversations to support students in developing

their final papers. This will be followed by a dedicated session featuring representatives from EU

institutions and civil society organizations, who will share their firsthand experience with eco-social

policymaking. The final part of the course will consist of students presenting their draft final papers,

providing an opportunity for feedback and collective learning.

• 1 paper: students will work in small groups to produce a final paper. Each group will

select one eco-social policy area and choose an empirical case study within that area.

They will then conduct exploratory desk research on a specific dimension of the

policymaking process (policy design; risk mapping; institutional arrangements; public

• Active engagement during the semester and especially during the session with invited

European policymakers and stakeholders 10%