2026-09-24
Olga Kolotouchkina, Paloma Piqueiras, Sara Clavero
This thematic issue critically engages with the complexities and challenges of the governance of the twin transition through the lens of inclusion and social justice. Scholars and practitioners from Belgium, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Taiwan examine the origins, determinants, and dynamics of inequalities associated with the twin transition process across different contexts and policy domains. The contributions highlight key governance challenges, identify emerging forms of vulnerability, and bring into focus opportunities to ensure that no one is left behind in the ongoing technological and sustainable transformation.
2026-09-16
Andrés Arias Astray, Melisa Campana Alabarce, David Alonso González, Juan Brea Iglesias
This article analyses how the simultaneous pursuit of green decarbonisation and digital transformation—the twin transition—generates disproportionate structural burdens on marginalised social groups. Drawing on Max Weber’s ideal‐type methodology ( Idealtypus ) and Spanish statistical evidence, it develops six prototypical profiles of structural exclusion across key twin‐transition sectors: urban mobility and transport, the platform and gig economy, rural energy and depopulation, digital public infrastructure and smart cities, digital agriculture, and urban renovation. Each profile identifies the mechanisms through which green and digital policies impose unequal costs on vulnerable groups, examining the resulting dynamics of institutional disaffection, potential political radicalisation, and common structural patterns. Comparative analysis identifies four recurring exclusion mechanisms—the upfront cost barrier, the digital literacy gateway, the geographic penalty, and knowledge disqualification—tracing a common pathway from structural exclusion to political disaffection. The article concludes by proposing five governance principles grounded in community work and participatory governance, offering a framework transferable to comparable EU contexts.
2026-09-02
Cheng-Hsuan Tsai
The digital divide remains a critical challenge, as unequal access to technology reinforces existing social inequalities. Although education is a well-established factor in promoting digital inclusion, closing the gap requires a comprehensive examination of the interplay between education and other factors. Drawing on the social model of disability, this study examines whether the digital access gap between persons with and without disabilities widens at higher educational levels. This study evaluates digital disparities across four stages of digital access (mental, material, skills, and usage access) using Taiwan’s Digital Access Survey from 2020, 2022, 2023, and 2024. Multiple logistic regression models are employed to examine the interaction between education and disability status. The findings show that higher education is associated with more positive attitudes toward technology, greater internet adoption, stronger digital skills, and higher engagement in online activities such as financial and government services. However, these benefits are generally less pronounced for persons with disabilities. In contrast, more fundamental domains, such as social and healthcare usage, show more comparable patterns across people with and without disabilities. These results suggest that digital inequality is not uniform across different dimensions of digital access and may be shaped by inaccessible environments and structural inequalities embedded within digital and social systems. As such, merely raising overall educational levels may be insufficient to bridge the digital divide and may even allow inequalities to persist beneath the appearance of educational equality. Digital inclusion policies should therefore pay greater attention to the structural conditions that continue to marginalize persons with disabilities.
2026-08-12
Marcus Erridge, Eleonora Gea Piccardi, Irina Velicu, Hestia Delibas
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.
2026-07-28
Khoi Hoang Nguyen
Vietnam is frequently portrayed as a climate governance frontrunner among Global South countries, having adopted an early Net Zero-emission-by-2050 pledge and multiple decarbonization policies. In parallel, the government has launched a digital transformation agenda with similarly bold ambitions. Although equity and inclusion language accompanies both agendas, they operate within a one-party political system marked by bureaucratic fragmentation and a strong economic development emphasis. This article examines how justice is articulated in Vietnam’s green and digital transformations and identifies factors shaping these outcomes. It analyzes key policy documents and leadership speeches through a three-dimensional framework, encompassing recognition, distributive, and procedural justice, complemented by expert interviews. The findings indicate that while the green transformation is slightly more vulnerability-sensitive than the digital transformation, both ultimately follow similar structural patterns. While early green strategies are more people-centered and attentive to disadvantaged groups, these features are diluted in implementation and converge toward the digital agenda’s consistently managerial-developmentalist pattern. Across both agendas, welfare-enhancing measures risk imposing adjustment burdens, while participation remains largely passive and symbolic. These uncoordinated agendas converge under shared structural constraints: policy integration limits, leadership influence, and international reputational-financial dynamics. The article develops this as the parallel transformation concept, an alternative to the twin transformation model, which associates such justice limitations with the market-oriented conditions of Global North liberal democracies and looks to departures from these conditions for a remedy. That they recur in Vietnam, a near-antipode of these settings, suggests their presence is not the cause of weak transformational justice, nor their absence its cure.
2026-07-28
Conchi Campillo-Alhama, Miguel-Ángel Mateo-Perez
The twin green and digital transition is reshaping municipal governance through increasingly complex communication environments that mediate access to public services, policy interpretation, and citizen participation. The existing research on digital governance, age-friendly cities, accessibility, and participatory governance has made significant advances in understanding the challenges older adults face in digitized institutional contexts. However, municipal communication remains insufficiently conceptualized as an object of participatory evaluation. This article develops a theoretical framework, grounded in a critical review, to examine communicative exclusion as a specific form of institutional inequality that affects older adults in contexts of accelerated socio-technical transformation. The analysis argues that communication exclusion cannot be reduced to individual deficits in digital skills; rather, it must also be understood in relation to how municipalities design and organize their communication systems, information architectures, and digital infrastructures. Drawing on the literature on citizen observatories and participatory governance, this article sets forth the model of inclusive communication observatories as a participatory evaluation infrastructure through which older adults can contribute to the co-definition, auditing, interpretation, and institutional review of municipal communication processes. The work shifts communication from a secondary administrative function to a procedural requirement that determines the intelligibility and accessibility of, and participation in, public policies. The article conceptualizes inclusive communication observatories as an infrastructure for shared governance and participatory evaluation. This contribution expands the conversation on procedural justice, digital ageism, age-friendly governance, and democratic inclusion within the context of the twin green and digital transition.
2026-07-15
Sara Parra Ferreras, Liisa Irene Hänninen
The intersection between climate change and human migration is emerging as one of the most complex challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. In the current context of increasing extreme weather phenomena, social polarization, and political debate on migration, it is crucial to construct media narratives that promote the “right” social understanding of climate migration. The current research analyses media discourse on the topic at the Southern border of Europe in 2025. Using a methodological approach that combines content analysis with critical discourse analysis, this study examines the prioritisation of information, interpretative frameworks, and strategies employed by six leading newspapers in Spain, namely El País, elDiario.es, El Mundo, ABC, Canarias7, and Diario Sur. The results show that the press decontextualises climate migration, portraying it in remote scenarios and prioritising the voices of institutions over those of the victims themselves. This narrative generates a “climate paradox,” understood as a contradiction that highlights external vulnerability whilst concealing industrial causes, avoiding delving deeper into the debate on the need for legal and structural reforms. The phenomenon is thus reduced to an isolated biophysical problem or an aesthetic drama, reinforcing a bureaucratic view that sidesteps transnational climate and financial justice.
2026-07-15
Sebastian Svenberg, Anna Davidsson, Sofia Strid, Christopher Ali Thorén, Martin Hultman
This article critically explores vulnerability as a key concept for analysing structural inequality. Drawing on 402 narrative interviews across 30 European NUTS2 regions, it examines how governance barriers hinder a just transition. The interviews capture diverse positions in terms of age, class, gender, occupation, place of residence, migration patterns, etc., asking how green and digital transitions affect everyday life. Empirically, the article advances two core arguments: First, vulnerability is not a stable identifier but a contingent, relational, and processual condition that emerges across situations and temporal trajectories. Second, the twin green and digital transition reshapes vulnerability in unpredictable ways, as policies and transition processes transform socio-economic and socio-technical relations, generating new forms of agency and vulnerability. The findings show that processual vulnerability involves accommodation, resistance, negotiation, and everyday reconfiguration, offering insights into how vulnerability can be approached not as a stable identifier or statistical category, but as a process. The results are relevant for qualitative and quantitative studies of the twin transition.
2026-07-08
Laura Armayones Carranza, Lluís Viñé Rius
The twin transition—green and digital—is a European Commission priority, but it raises concerns of misalignment and unequal impacts. While foresight approaches are increasingly used to inform policymaking, there is still limited methodological guidance on how to systematically integrate vulnerability into participatory scenario-building processes. Policies may unintentionally generate disadvantaged groups, making a just transition essential. The Fair and Inclusive Twin Transitions for a Stronger Social Europe (FITTER-EU) project develops a scenario-building methodology to anticipate socio-technical transformations across four sectors (housing and built environment, transport and mobility, energy, and agriculture) in six countries (Spain, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, and Portugal). The methodology employed combines a multi-level perspective (MLP), distinguishing between niches (emerging innovations), regimes (established systems), and landscapes (macro-level contexts), with the PESTLE analysis (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal, Environmental). This MLP-PESTLE framework is operationalised as both a conceptual and analytical structure, supporting the design of exploratory scenarios grounded in expert evidence, collected through semi-structured interviews and a Delphi survey of policymakers, civil society representatives, researchers, and private sector experts. Findings highlight the methodology’s value for addressing unwanted impacts on societal groups, structuring the plurality of perspectives, and supporting its translation into three exploratory scenario configurations per sector (optimistic, neutral, pessimistic) by 2050. These scenarios represent alternative narratives of governance capacity, policy coherence, and social inclusion, reflecting different levels of achievement toward socio-technical transition objectives. This study contributes to the literature by providing a participatory methodological approach that integrates just transition considerations into foresight practices and tools for policymakers to foster anticipatory policymaking.
2026-03-26
Diego Garzia, Stefan Marschall, Mathias Wessel Tromborg, Andreas Albertsen
Voting advice applications (VAAs) are widely used digital tools that match voters’ policy preferences with party or candidate positions. Since their emergence in the 1980s and rapid expansion alongside internet dissemination, VAAs have spread to more than 80 countries and generated growing academic interest. This thematic issue advances the field by analysing behavioural effects, user diversity, design innovations, including AI-driven conversational agents, and the validity of VAA-generated data. Together, the contributions demonstrate both the maturation of VAA research and its continued relevance for understanding democratic representation.
2026-02-11
Naomi Kamoen, Christine Liebrecht, Rieke van Lieshout
Voters frequently struggle to understand political attitude statements in voting advice applications (VAAs) and often invest limited effort in resolving these difficulties. Conversational agent VAAs (CAVAAs) aim to reduce the cognitive effort involved in searching for relevant information by integrating chatbots that can provide contextual support. This article presents findings from three studies comparing CAVAAs to standard VAAs without additional information (Studies 1 and 2) and to VAAs with static clickable information (VAA+, Study 3). Study 1 (N = 93) was a laboratory experiment conducted during the 2023 Dutch parliamentary elections. University students were assigned to a standard VAA or a CAVAA. The chatbot in the CAVAA was used in approximately 45% of cases, with users showing a preference for opinion-based and status quo information. Compared to the VAA, CAVAAs reduced non-directional responses to the VAA statements and increased evaluations of the tool’s usability. Moreover, users’ perceived knowledge was higher, whereas no differences were found for factual knowledge and turnout intention. Study 2 (N = 144) largely replicated these results in a field setting with a more diverse sample and showed that the effects hold across different levels of political sophistication. Study 3 (N = 159), conducted during the 2024 European elections, compared a CAVAA to a VAA+. While VAA+ users requested information more frequently, both tools received similar evaluations, and this finding was again consistent across groups of different political sophistication. In the manuscript, we discuss the implications of these findings for theory and practice.
2026-01-28
Daniela Braun, Elisa Deiss-Helbig, Theresa Gessler, Jochen Müller, Julia Wagner, Georg Wenzelburger
When studying questions of European democracy, research is still very much focused on national political actors. This can be partly explained by the fact that data on political parties’ positions toward Europe and citizens’ attitudes have been mainly collected at the national level, and because sample sizes at the regional or local levels are too small. However, political parties compete about issues related to Europe on different levels—and especially so in European border regions where the local level coincides even more strongly with the EU level. For the particular case of such inner-EU border regions, home to around one third of EU citizens, little is known about patterns of party competition and citizens’ specific demands and preferences. This study addresses this gap, using innovative data from the voting advice application VOTO, specifically designed for local elections held in Germany in 2024. Focusing on four German border regions—two on the Eastern and two on the Western border—it provides new insights into how European democracy works at the local level by examining political parties’ positions and citizens’ political preferences. In particular, the study investigates the extent to which border-specific features and party cues shape voters’ perspectives on cross-border cooperation and European integration. Our findings speak not only to insights from qualitative case studies, which tell us that citizens living in such border regions have specific preferences in terms of saliency and positions, but also to quantitative research studying Euroscepticism in European border regions.