The comparative politics of just transition policies: building green-red winning coalitions in Spain and Ireland

Just transition policies can be useful measures to address the new social risks of industrial decarbonization. However, while these policies are growing empirically, they remain arguably undertheorized. Navigating a largely unexplored field, this article aims to strengthen our understanding of just transition policymaking with a theory-generating ambition. It does so by asking: what explains the adoption of just transition policies? Following a Most Different Systems Design, Spain and Ireland have been selected as comparative case studies to reconstruct the political trajectories behind national just transition policies. Drawing from coalition theories, empirical analysis maps the preferences of and interactions between political parties and organised interest groups. The article relies on outcome-explaining process tracing and qualitative methods, including the analysis of policy and press documents, and thirty-nine semi-structured interviews with policymakers and other informants. The core argument is that just transition policies emerge as the result of green-red winning coalitions steered by powerful entrepreneurs, who engage in political exchanges with other socio-political actors in order to trade political support for decarbonisation, in exchange for economic support to affected societal groups.