2.1. Socioecological transformations, decolonial environmental justice and degrowth

Based on my previous work, in this article socioecological transformations are understood as radical, counterhegemonic processes aimed at unlearning and undoing dominant (neo)colonial, capitalist, extractivist, and growth-oriented structures and social relations, with the objective of enabling post-capitalist, post-growth, and decolonial futures (Hamilton & Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Hamilton and Ramcilovic-Suominen2023; Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen2023; Ramcilovic-Suominen et al., Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen, Kröger and Dressler2022; Verhaeghe & Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Verhaeghe and Ramcilovic-Suominen2024). This understanding deliberately distances transformations from notions of transition and incremental change, which typically leave intact the structural drivers of socioecological crises (Feola et al., Reference Feola, Vincent and Moore2021; Pelenc et al., Reference Pelenc, Wallenborn, Milanesi, Sébastien, Vastenaekels, Lajarthe, Frère, Cervera-marzal, Carimentrand, Merveille and Frère2019; Temper et al., Reference Temper, Walter, Rodriguez, Kothari and Turhan2018). Meaningful transformations thus require departure from the dominant capitalist and growth-centered ideologies and structures (Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen, Kangas, Gataulina, Poutanen, Rajala and Ventovirta2025a, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen2025b), and a profound onto-epistemic departure or unlearning of related imaginaries, values, and logics (Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen2025b, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen2025c).

Structural and onto-epistemic change necessarily unfolds through personal and collective processes, embedding thus the socioecological transformations in social movements and grassroots initiatives that challenge dominant modes of socioecological organization (Kothari et al., Reference Kothari, Salleh, Escobar, Demaria and Acosta2019; Mehta et al., Reference Mehta, Srivastava, Movik, Adam, D'souza, Parthasarathy and Ohte2021; De Rosa et al., Reference De Rosa, de Moor and Dabaieh2022; Sovacool, Reference Sovacool2022; Temper et al., Reference Temper, Avila, Del Bene, Gobby, Kosoy, Le Billon, Walter, Perkins, Roy, Scheidel and Walter2020). Such transformations are also relational in nature, foregrounding the importance of ‘right’ or ethical relations among humans and between humans and more-than-human worlds (Gram-Hanssen et al., Reference Gram-hanssen, Schafenacker and Bentz2021, Vogel & O'Brien, Reference Vogel and O'Brien2022). While this article focuses empirically on policy institutions rather than social movements, these perspectives provide an important backdrop for assessing the scope and limits of state-led transformative projects.

My earlier theorizing on socioecological transformations emphasizes their uncertain, emergent, heterogeneous, and contested character (Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen2023, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen2023). This openness, while politically generative, also renders transformative concepts particularly vulnerable to cooptation and watering down in ways that ultimately reinforce business-as-usual trajectories (Ajl Reference Ajl2022; Eversberg et al., Reference Eversberg, Koch, Lehmann, Saltelli, Ramcilovic-Suominen and Kovacic2023). By cooptation, I refer to processes through which the language and the practices of transformative change are taken up in ways that bypass or depoliticize the structural roots of socioecological crises, including extractivist, capitalist, and (neo)colonial relations. Rather than challenging these foundations, such rearticulations often leave them unquestioned, thereby reproducing and stabilizing dominant political–economic arrangements, even as this may increase fragility in times of socioecological crisis (Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen2023, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen, Kangas, Gataulina, Poutanen, Rajala and Ventovirta2025a).

Decolonial environmental justice (DEJ) starts with the premise that colonialism and capitalism are not historically sequential or analytically separable systems, but mutually constitutive processes – capitalism is colonialism, and colonialism is capitalism (Danewid, Reference Danewid2023; Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen, Kangas, Gataulina, Poutanen, Rajala and Ventovirta2025a, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen2023; Sultana, Reference Sultana2022). From this perspective, contemporary socioecological crises, including climate change, biodiversity loss, global inequality, and social fragmentations, are direct outcomes of colonial–capitalist nexus of extraction, accumulation, domination, and dispossession (Fraser, Reference Fraser2022).

Unlike liberal or distributive approaches to environmental justice that focus primarily on the allocation of harms and benefits, DEJ foregrounds historical responsibility, power, and the reproduction of colonial relations through ostensibly progressive policies and interventions (Álvarez & Coolsaet, Reference Álvarez and Coolsaet2020; Ramcilovic-Suominen et al., Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen, Chomba, Larson, Sinclair and Katila2024). It attends simultaneously to material and structural injustices, such as those discussed in the context of degrowth (next subsection), as well as to ontological and epistemic violence that shape what is considered legitimate knowledge, rational policy, and feasible action (Escobar, Reference Escobar2008, Reference Escobar2018).

Applied to EU green policy, DEJ enables an analysis of how ‘green’ interventions may simultaneously address environmental concerns while reproducing colonial–capitalist power relations across space, scale, and species (Almeida et al., Reference Almeida, Kolinjivadi, Ferrando, Roy, Herrera, Gonçalves and Van Hecken2023; Backhouse et al., Reference Backhouse, Lehmann, Lorenzen, Lühmann, Puder, Rodríguez and Tittor2021; Sultana, Reference Sultana2022, Reference Sultana2023). This includes attention to the EU’s historical and ongoing responsibility for overconsumption and resource appropriation, the externalization of socioecological costs to the Global South, and the marginalization of indigenous ontologies, knowledge, and legal systems, rejecting thus their rights and claims in policy design and governance (Escobar, Reference Escobar2008, Reference Escobar2018, McGregor, Reference McGregor2008; Whyte, Reference Whyte2020). From a DEJ perspective, justice cannot be reduced to compensation, mitigation, or inclusion within existing growth-oriented frameworks, but requires confronting the structural conditions that sustain exploitation, domination, and dispossession (Álvarez & Coolsaet, Reference Álvarez and Coolsaet2020; Ramcilovic-Suominen et al., Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen, Chomba, Larson, Sinclair and Katila2024; Verhaeghe & Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Verhaeghe and Ramcilovic-Suominen2024).

Degrowth: In its most common or widely popularized framing, degrowth is defined as a democratically planned reduction of energy and material use aimed at bringing economies into balance with the living world, while simultaneously tackling inequality and improving human well-being (Hickel, Reference Hickel2021). Degrowth challenges the hegemony of economic growth – including its green variants – by identifying growth dependency and capitalist accumulation as structural drivers of socioecological crises, global inequality, and ongoing (neo)colonial extraction (Buch-Hansen et al., Reference Buch-Hansen, Koch and Nesterova2024; Hickel & Kallis, Reference Hickel and Kallis2020; Hickel & Sullıvan, Reference Hickel and Sullıvan2023). From this degrowth perspective, tackling socioecological injustices requires reducing material and energy throughput, overconsumption, and unequal appropriation of resources in the Global North and, more broadly, calls for a democratic socialism (Hickel & Sullıvan, Reference Hickel and Sullıvan2023; Hickel et al., Reference Hickel, Sullivan and Zoomkawala2021).

Degrowth scholarship emphasizes the need to reimagine the idea of a ‘good life’ through collectively defined societal and socioecological boundaries, while fostering liberation from relations of violence, domination, and exploitation (Durand et al., Reference Durand, Hofferberth and Schmelzer2024). Increasingly, degrowth explicitly engages with decolonial and feminist critiques which helpfully emphasize how growth-centered economies depend on forms of social reproduction, care work, and more-than-human labor that are routinely undervalued, and rendered invisible within dominant economic frameworks (Lang, Reference Lang2024; Nirmal & Rocheleau, Reference Nirmal and Rocheleau2019). In full awareness of diverse perspectives within the degrowth literature, this article treats degrowth as a helpful additional lens for assessing the transformative claims of EU green policy in the larger contexts of decoloniality and socioecological transformations. It enables deeper look at how growth-oriented logics and structures, even when articulated through sustainability and transition discourses, constrain the possibilities for post-growth, post-capitalist, and decolonial futures within state-led transformation projects, rather than enabling them.

2.2. Transformative change assessment and socioecological transformations

The conceptualization of socioecological transformations developed in this article resonates with the recent IPBES Transformative Change Assessment (TCA) (IPBES 2024). The TCA defines transformative change as fundamental shifts in views, structures, and practices that address the underlying causes of biodiversity loss and socioecological degradation. The TCA identifies four key principles for transformative change, including equity and justice; pluralism and inclusion; respectful and reciprocal human-nature relationships; and adaptive learning and action. It emphasizes that transformation requires confronting systemic root drivers, such as inequitable power relations, economic paradigms centered on economic growth, and systemic disconnection between people and nature. It identifies degrowth and postcapitalism as important strategies and pathways to transformative change, as well as the care economy (Dengler, C., & Strunk, Reference Dengler and Strunk2018), as well as the importance of decolonizing academia, methods, and land, and the importance of indigenous knowledge and indigenous forms of governance (Arora-Jonsson, S., & Wahlström, Reference Arora-Jonsson and Wahlström2023; McGregor, Reference McGregor2008; Whyte, Reference Whyte2020).

While the TCA provides a broad opening for understanding systemic transformation, the framework developed here and inrtoduced above places more explicit analytical weight on de/post-growth and DEJ. These lenses sharpen the critique by centering the histories and continuing dynamics of colonial extraction, accumulation, and epistemic hierarchy through which socioecological crises are produced and sustained. The focus of our framework on transformations is more specifically placed on interrogating the colonial–capitalist structures, growth dependency, and onto-epistemic domination and hierarchy, as constitutive structures and relations to be unlearned and undone rather than merely reoriented (Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen2025b). The EU’s GT thus serves as an empirical site through which to assess whether and how the structural drivers identified by the TCA are confronted, rearticulated, or neutralized in practice.

2.3. Outlining transformative policy from a decolonial, justice-centered, and postgrowth perspectives

Predefining transformative processes and policies involves a degree of contradiction in terms. Nonetheless, science and research constantly engage in designing transformative pathways, of which the TCA introduced above is a clear example. To outline what decolonial, justice-centered, and post-growth policy would entail, I will draw from earlier work where some guiding principles and dimensions are outlined (Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen2023; Ramcilovic-Suominen et al., Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen, Kröger and Dressler2022, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen, Chomba, Larson, Sinclair and Katila2024; Verhaeghe & Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Verhaeghe and Ramcilovic-Suominen2024; Vezzoni & Ramcilovic, Reference Vezzoni and Ramcilovic2023).

As the bare minimum such policies would address the root cause including (i) constant growth on a finite planet and the myth of green growth; (ii) the anthropocentric perspective and seeing the rest of nature as an asset and service provider to humans; and (iii) the (neo)colonial and capitalist underpinnings of today’s socioecological crises.

First, transformative policy would require actors such as the EU to have institutionally embedded critical self-reflexivity, including a deliberate inward shift in focus when identifying policy problems and solutions. This entails examining how European consumption patterns, geopolitical positioning, and economic mandates contribute to global socioecological harm, rather than externalizing responsibility. Second, it would embed environmental governance within historical accountability, explicitly addressing colonial and neocolonial relations and structures in trade, extraction, and land use governance. This includes interrogating who defines objectives, who decides on locations and priorities, and whose interests, knowledge systems, and ontologies are marginalized or silenced in policy formation and implementation (Ramcilovic-Suominen et al., Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen, Kröger and Dressler2022). Third, transformative policy would center socioecological and epistemic justice by promoting locally grounded agency, self-determination, and self-governance, ensuring that benefits, trade-offs, and restoration objectives are locally defined rather than externally imposed (Ramcilovic-Suominen et al., Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen, Chomba, Larson, Sinclair and Katila2024). Fourth, it would challenge structural growth dependency and anthropocentric framings of nature as resource, confronting the myth of green growth and reorienting economic activity toward sufficiency, wellbeing for all beings and relations, both human and more-than-human (Vezzoni & Ramcilovic, Reference Vezzoni and Ramcilovic2023). Last but not least, as elaborated in Verhaeghe and Ramcilovic-Suominen (Reference Verhaeghe and Ramcilovic-Suominen2024), transformative pathways would involve shifting dominant values, and lexicon; democratizing economic governance; enabling post-growth business models; and redefining prosperity beyond competitiveness and accumulation. Taken together, these dimensions clarify what it would mean to move beyond compensatory or technocratic reform toward structural socioecological transformation. They provide the analytical backdrop against which the EU’s GT is assessed in the empirical sections that follow.

2.4. Methods: empirical material

The empirical material for this article was generated during my research visit to the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the EC, following their invitation to engage and collaborate on bioeconomy policy and justice. As part of this visit, a two-day Community of Practice workshop (10–11 November 2022) was co-organized with the JRC, bringing together policy officers from multiple Commission services, academics and scholars advancing justice and degrowth research agenda and practice. This was followed by semi-structured interviews with EC officials.

The workshop brought together EC policy officers (13), JRC researchers (4), and invited external scholars (4) to reflect on competing narratives of sustainability, transformation, justice, and degrowth in relation to the EGD and the EUBE. The workshop discussions were subsequently synthesized and published as a JRC report (Giuntoli et al., Reference Giuntoli, Oliver, Kallis, Ramcilovik-Suominen, Monbiot, Giuntoli and Mubareka2023), which I co-authored and draw upon here as both contextual and empirical material. The analysis also draws on, while substantially revising, an earlier published book chapter based on the same empirical material and engagement (Ramcilovic-Suominen Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen2025d).

The workshop marked the starting point of this empirical engagement and informed the subsequent design of semi-structured interviews with EC policy officers working across the EUBE and the EGD and GT policy domains more broadly. In total, 12 interviews were conducted with EC policy officers based at the different Directorates-General, working on themes such as blue bioeconomy, climate change, biodiversity, and economic growth. The interviews were conducted through Microsoft Teams and face-to-face. MS Teams was used as a medium for automatic transcriptions, as recording was not the preferred option for the interviewees. While all interviews informed the analysis and were used analytically to identify recurring themes, framings, rationales, and governance logics, due to variable transcription quality, only a subset of interviews is cited directly.

Interview participation was voluntary and informed by the research purpose and intended academic use of the material. Anonymity was ensured throughout. Interviews were not systematically recorded; detailed notes and, where applicable, automatic transcripts were used. Data were securely stored and anonymized during analysis. Access to policy actors was facilitated by the JRC, which functioned as an intermediary. While this enabled privileged institutional access, it also shaped the research context: discussions unfolded within formal settings, with participants repeatedly emphasizing that their views and inputs did not represent their institutional positions. My prior work on socioecological transformations, degrowth, and DEJ, noted above, informed the analytical framing. More concretely, these frameworks and concepts guided the analyses and attention to how policy actors defined transformation, growth, justice, feasibility, and responsibility; how structural drivers such as growth dependency, colonial relations, and epistemic hierarchies were acknowledged, reframed, or bypassed; and how barriers to transformative change were articulated and justified within institutional settings. They served as interpretive heuristics against which empirical material was read and re-read to identify patterns and trends. Throughout this process, I reflected and paid attention to how my normative orientation and positionality, as well as the institutional power asymmetries inherent in elite policy research (Ball 2005, Tuncel 2026) shaped both data collection and interactions, as well as interpretation of results.

3.1. Transformations = green transition

Analysis of the interviews and workshop discussions reveals that EU policy actors frequently use the terms socioecological transformations and (green) transition interchangeably, effectively collapsing the former into the latter. While some participants demonstrated awareness of conceptual distinctions between transformations as a more radical systemic change and transition as incremental adjustment, any differences largely collapsed in the policy and practice domain. As several policy officers explained, the policy domain is understood as a space of dialogue, compromise, and gradual change, within which only transitions – rather than transformations – are considered politically feasible. As one interviewee noted, ‘policy is based on dialogue, and dialogue leads to incremental change. If you do not want incremental change, you will have revolution’ (Int. 3). Within this framing, socioecological transformation is redefined as a managed transition from fossil-based to ‘green’ and bio-based economies, rather than a shift away from growth-dependent and socioecologically extractivist and violent structures and logics.

This conceptual collapse of transformations into transition was further justified by research participants through explicit reference to existing economic and political structures, which were treated as fixed parameters. Interviewees consistently emphasized that any form of socioecological change must occur within prevailing institutional arrangements, despite acknowledging their limitations and asymmetric power relations. Structural or systemic change was framed as too time-consuming, conflict-inducing, or complex to be pursued through a policy, particularly in light of perceived climate and other urgencies. Socioecological transformations were therefore considered incompatible with the mandates, and political constraints of EU policymaking (see also Section 4).

While interviewees recognized weaknesses in existing governance structures – including hierarchy, corporate lobbying, and limited influence over broader economic frameworks – these constraints were largely taken for granted. Transformations that would require confronting growth dependency, restructuring political–economic relations, or addressing colonial legacies were positioned outside the realm of feasible policy domain and concrete action. The GT was framed as the only viable pathway forward, one that could be pursued without destabilizing dominant institutional arrangements or provoking fundamental political conflict. This is despite the fact that several interviewees explicitly acknowledged shortcomings of EU green policies, and the contradictions embedded within the EGD and EUBE. Notably, such critiques were articulated as observations rather than as grounds for political or institutional reorientation. As one respondent remarked, ‘The EU policies look good on paper because they do not reveal the ugly side in practice. For instance, the EU must secure raw materials in some way, from somewhere for the green transition. But that question is taboo in the house’ (Int. 1). Despite this awareness, confronting the structural implications of such contradictions – particularly those related to extractivism, resource competition, and externalized socioecological costs – was framed as lying beyond the remit of EU policymaking.

This distancing was reinforced through claims of institutional mandates (Section 4), whereby fundamental questions concerning economic growth, global inequalities, or colonial responsibility were positioned as either too politically sensitive or belonging to other governance arenas, beyond the EC, most notable the United Nations. In this way, critique was acknowledged yet rendered inert, functioning less as a catalyst for change than as a means of reaffirming the inevitability of the green transition as the dominant policy horizon.

3.2. Degrowth = sustainable consumption and sufficiency

Degrowth emerged as one of the most contentious concepts in both the interviews and the workshop discussions. With the exception of two participants, policy actors overwhelmingly described degrowth as politically nonviable and unhelpful, or outright taboo within EC policy and the everyday practice and policymaking. The term itself was repeatedly characterized as ‘against transformations’, ‘too controversial’, or incompatible with not only economic but also human development and progress. As one interviewee stated, ‘Degrowth is opposite of transformation. If you want to see transformations, you better forget degrowth, because it only brings conflict and being stuck in place, at the policy level I mean’ (Int. 2). Another policy officer similarly remarked, ‘Degrowth is a curse word in politics. The name is key for selling and promoting a new issue. Degrowth will never sell (…) and you know, you need markets, and you need regulations, degrowth is extremely controversial for both’ (Int. 3).

Notwithstanding the resistance to the term itself, policy actors did not dispute the underlying concerns raised by degrowth scholars, including the degrowth address during the workshop (Giuntoli et al., Reference Giuntoli, Oliver, Kallis, Ramcilovik-Suominen, Monbiot, Giuntoli and Mubareka2023). Most research participants acknowledged the existence of planetary boundaries and recognized overconsumption as a pressing socioecological problem. At the same time, degrowth as a political project or policy orientation remained firmly excluded from consideration. As one interviewee explained:

This selective acceptance illustrates how degrowth is stripped of its political and structural content while its diagnostic elements are absorbed into existing policy framings. By translating degrowth into issues of consumption efficiency, circularity, and decoupling, policy actors reframe a radical critique of growth into a set of technocratic objectives that can be pursued without challenging the growth-oriented foundations of the societal institutions and economic governance.

To manage the internal contradictions whereby the problems identified by degrowth scholarship were broadly accepted while degrowth itself was rejected as a policy orientation, policy actors proposed a range of alternative terms intended to render these concerns politically palatable. These substitutes effectively displace the political, justice-oriented, and post-growth dimensions of degrowth, while retaining elements that could be accommodated within existing green policy frameworks. Interviewees referred to concepts such as ‘sustainable growth’, suggesting a reconciliation of sustainability and growth; ‘wellbeing-oriented growth’, because ‘growth is not only pollution, it's also all these other good things’; and ‘regenerative growth’. Furthermore, ‘post-growth’, and even ‘re-growth’ terms were evoked, where ‘post-’ and ‘re-’ prefixes meant to signal improvement without abandoning growth as a central objective. As one interviewee summarized, this amounted to ‘anything else but degrowth’ (Int. 2).

Among these rearticulations, ‘sufficiency’ and ‘sustainable consumption’ emerged as the most accepted terms, both of which frame socioecological limits as technical and measurable issues rather than as matters of political economy, power, or redistribution. These concepts have increasingly entered EU policy discourse and bioeconomy strategies (European Commission, 2022), where they are mobilized to promote efficiency gains and behavioral change without questioning the structural drivers of overconsumption or the EU's role in reproducing global inequalities (Giuntoli et al., Reference Giuntoli, Oliver, Kallis, Ramcilovik-Suominen, Monbiot, Giuntoli and Mubareka2023). In this way, degrowth is not only renamed but substantively transformed, as its radical critique of growth and accumulation is translated into a depoliticized policy vocabulary compatible with green growth agenda.

3.3. Decolonial environmental justices (DEJ) = techno-managerial compensation for harm done

Similar to transformations and degrowth, DEJ was not rejected by the EU policy actors, but it was instead framed as a domain of concern that exceeded the scope of EU green policymaking. Research participants widely acknowledged the EU's colonial history, its ongoing neocolonial tendencies, and the injustices associated with global extraction and unequal ecological exchange, including epistemic injustices in policy design and implementation. At the same time, justice – particularly in its decolonial articulation – was described as too complex, controversial, or politically sensitive to be meaningfully addressed through EU green policy instruments. As one interviewee stated, ‘What you term as tools for change are deadlock for change in policy, including justice, due to the controversial and contentious nature. What is just for me may not be so for you’ (Int. 5).

This framing effectively positioned justice as an abstract concern rather than a structural and political imperative. By casting DEJ as inherently subjective and divisive, the majority of respondents displaced questions of responsibility, power, and redistribution from the realm of actionable policy, thereby narrowing the scope of what could be considered legitimate intervention under the EU GT. While respondents recognized that the GT may reproduce neocolonial relations and injustices, their responses consistently shifted away from questions of responsibility and structural change toward mitigation and compensation. This logic is clearly illustrated in the following sequence of reflections by one interviewee: ‘Green transition may imply neocolonial project, but we must do it and we can always compensate for it.’ ‘Yes, and we need to compensate for extractivism and injustices in the Global South. But how do we mitigate our impact, is the question. How do we pay for it? We can pay for restoring the forest and biodiversity loss that our high consumption led to.’ ‘We need new technologies and new infrastructures to produce less ecologically destructive food and feed.’

These statements exemplify how recognition of injustice is immediately followed by a managerial reframing of solutions, centered on compensation, restoration, and technological innovation. Rather than opening spaces for debates on responsibility, or reparative justice, decolonial concerns were rendered governable through technical fixes and financial mechanisms. In this way, DEJ is depoliticized and translated into a compensatory logic, i.e., the infamous ‘will to improve’ logic (Li, Reference Li2007).

The solutions and policy actions offered further depoliticized and deradicalized the very idea of DEJ by translating it into vague and consensual policy slogans. Among these, the ‘Leave no one behind’ principle was repeatedly cited as one of the most transformative elements of the EGD. However, such slogans operate precisely by avoiding questions of responsibility, leadership, and power, including who is expected to lead socioecological change, who is required to adapt, and under what conditions. In doing so, they risk reproducing hierarchical and paternalistic imaginaries in which those most affected by socioecological harm are positioned as passive recipients rather than political actors with agency.

Instances of dissent or alternative imaginaries were acknowledged but framed as marginal to mainstream policy processes. One example given by interviewees was the EU Staff for Climate Footnote ² initiative, in which staff members from different EU institutions petitioned EU leadership to take stronger climate action. While such initiatives were recognized as important, they were simultaneously described as peripheral to dominant policy trajectories and easily absorbed into existing narratives of democratic openness. As one interviewee noted, such internal dissent can be mobilized to demonstrate pluralism exclaiming sarcastically that ‘see, we also have disagreeing voices and live to our democratic principles’ (Int. 5) – without substantively altering policy direction. In this way, symbolic gestures of inclusion and participation function to legitimize existing GT projects while leaving their underlying growth-oriented and colonial-capitalist logics intact.

3.4. The competing motives and the contested notions of transformations & green transition (GT), and how favoring one over the other makes the EU’s GT a barrier for socioecological transformations

The empirical findings presented above reveal that the deradicalization of socioecological transformations within EU green policy is not accidental, but t is linked to continued dominance of economic growth, and control over nature tendency. Deradicalization also emerges from the coexistence of competing and often contradictory motives underpinning the GT project. The inner tension clearly emerged during the workshop, where the participants explained that while ‘the European Green Deal is very ambitious’, it is also ‘not enough for a real transformation’ and that objectives centered on innovation and growth remain institutionally entrenched. This coexisted with voices from some workshop participants questioning the relevance of economic growth in the context of socioecological collapse, stating that ‘A specific objective is innovation and growth. But do we want to keep it (that way)?’ (Workshop notes).

Taken together, the interviews and the workshop discussions point to two dominant motives or drivers shaping EU engagement with the narrative of transformations. The first relates to growing climate urgency and intensifying public pressure, including civil disobedience and youth-led climate and environmental justice movements, which have challenged political inaction both within (e.g. Brás et al., Reference Brás, Ferreira and Carvalho2024; De Rosa et al., Reference De Rosa, de Moor and Dabaieh2022) and outside the EU (Sultana, Reference Sultana2022, Reference Sultana2023). Some workshop participants stated that ‘Justice is at the core, we cannot do transformation ignoring justice and equality.’ ‘Should we have a specific objective on justice and equity?’ The second motive concerns the EU’s ambition to position itself as a global leader in decarbonization, green industry, and technological innovation, particularly in a context of geopolitical competition and resource insecurity (Brand & Wissen, Reference Brand and Wissen2024; Herranz-Surrallés, Reference Herranz-Surrallés2025). The later stands as a dominant position, even as a few workshop participants acknowledged the risks, stating that ‘The risk is the Bioeconomy project becomes a colonization project.’ Adding that ‘We should invite African nations in our policy making…’, since ‘Our policies have an impact… especially countries “cursed” with resources’. At the time of my empirical research at the EC (October–December 2022), the geopolitical dynamics were, however, primarily articulated through the EU’s involvement in the war in Ukraine. Since then, geopolitical escalation has only intensified, including the EU’s political and material alignment with Israel in the ongoing genocide in Gaza (Salamanca et al., Reference Salamanca, Khosla and Aruri2024), raising profound questions about the coherence of EU claims to global environmental leadership, justice, and responsibility (The Transnational 2024; Middle East Eye News, 2024). Building the EU’s green transition as a global brand is closely linked to geopolitical tensions, particularly in relation to Russia and China, and most recently, in relation to the United States (US) as well. The competition, with an increasing number of rivalries over land, rare earth minerals, trade, and other resources required for leadership in the global green transition (Herranz-Surrallés, Reference Herranz-Surrallés2025) further reinforces the EU’s framing of green transition as a geopolitical and economic security project rather than one aiming at justice-oriented transformations.

These two motives pull EU green policy in divergent directions. While the former calls for deeper socioecological change, justice, and responsibility, the latter reinforces growth-dominant, competitive, and extractivist policy logics. As this analysis shows, privileging the second motive over the first has profound implications for how transformations are defined, which pathways are deemed feasible, and what agendas are ultimately served (Ajl, Reference Ajl2022; Eversberg et al., Reference Eversberg, Koch, Lehmann, Saltelli, Ramcilovic-Suominen and Kovacic2023).

The first motive identified by respondents relates to the growing sense of climate urgency and the associated public pressure confronting the EU institutions. Interviewees referred to intensified societal mobilization around climate change and environmental justice, including youth-led movements, civil disobedience, and protests against fossil capital and perceived political inaction (see also Brás et al., Reference Brás, Ferreira and Carvalho2024; De Rosa et al., Reference De Rosa, de Moor and Dabaieh2022). These pressures were described as key drivers behind the EU’s adoption of the language of change, transformations, and urgency, and as a response to widespread dissatisfaction with existing policy approaches. In this sense, the turn toward green transition discourse can be understood as, at least in part, a reaction to external demands for deeper socioecological change and accountability (Kothari et al., Reference Kothari, Salleh, Escobar, Demaria and Acosta2019; Mehta et al., Reference Mehta, Srivastava, Movik, Adam, D'souza, Parthasarathy and Ohte2021; Sovacool, Reference Sovacool2022; Temper et al., Reference Temper, Avila, Del Bene, Gobby, Kosoy, Le Billon, Walter, Perkins, Roy, Scheidel and Walter2020).

At the same time, the respondents acknowledged that these demands are often framed in explicitly justice-oriented terms, calling for responsibility, intergenerational equity, and more radical departures from business-as-usual. In principle, this motive can open political space for transformative imaginaries and futures that resonate with degrowth, DEJ, and broader critique of colonial-capitalist project. However, as the subsequent analysis demonstrates, this opening remains fragile and conditional, as there are various limits on how far such demands can be taken within the EU green policy.

The second motive is rooted in geopolitical tensions, industrial strategy, and concerns over resource security (Brand & Wissen, Reference Brand and Wissen2024; Herranz-Surrallés, Reference Herranz-Surrallés2025; Krüger, Reference Krüger2020). Policy actors described the green transition not only as a response to climate change but also as a strategic project through which the EU seeks to maintain economic competitiveness and global influence in an increasingly contested geopolitical landscape. In this framing, the green transition is closely tied to ambitions of technological leadership, green industrial growth, and securing access to critical raw materials (Almeida et al., Reference Almeida, Kolinjivadi, Ferrando, Roy, Herrera, Gonçalves and Van Hecken2023; Ford & Newell, Reference Ford and Newell2021; Kivimaa, Reference Kivimaa2024; Newell, Reference Newell2019). Interviewees and workshop participants emphasized that these geopolitical considerations have gained heightened significance in the context of war, energy insecurity, and shifting global power relations, which have only intensified since the time of this study.

This motive clarifies that rather than signaling a departure from growth-dependent and extractivist political–economic arrangements, the green transition becomes a new growth strategy aimed at safeguarding European industrial advantage and strategic autonomy (Ajl, Reference Ajl2021; Eversberg et al., Reference Eversberg, Koch, Lehmann, Saltelli, Ramcilovic-Suominen and Kovacic2023; Holz, Reference Holz2023; Ramcilovic-Suominen et al., Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen, Kröger and Dressler2022). Socioecological and justice-oriented concerns were subordinated to growth and competitiveness imperatives. Reducing EU overconsumption, addressing climate debt, or reconfiguring unequal global relations were rendered politically implausible. In privileging geopolitical and economic competition over transformations and justice, EU green policy consolidates a version of imperialist transition that reinforces the structures of violence that underpin socioecological crises (Brand & Wissen, Reference Brand and Wissen2024; Feola et al., Reference Feola, Vincent and Moore2021; Krüger, Reference Krüger2020). This tension is not merely rhetorical but structurally constitutive of the EU’s GT project (Section 4). As geopolitical and economic considerations increasingly dominate, transformative demands are selectively accommodated, translated, or neutralized in ways that preserve existing political–economic arrangements (Eversberg et al., Reference Eversberg, Koch, Lehmann, Saltelli, Ramcilovic-Suominen and Kovacic2023; Ramcilovic-Suominen, Reference Ramcilovic-Suominen, Kangas, Gataulina, Poutanen, Rajala and Ventovirta2025a). It is through this privileging of competitiveness over justice that the EU GT effectively represents a barrier to socioecological transformations, rather than a pathway.

4.1. Structural barriers: hierarchy, silos, and short-termism

A first set of barriers to socioecological transformations is structural in nature and relates to how EU green policy is organized, governed, and temporally oriented. These structural barriers do not operate as isolated constraints, but as mutually reinforcing conditions that delimit what kinds of change can be imagined, articulated, and pursued within policy processes.

Hierarchy constitutes the most fundamental of these barriers. As demonstrated in the empirical analysis, EU policymaking is embedded in hierarchical institutional arrangements that shape who has authority to define problems, who or what or whose knowledge passes the filtering out of demanding or non-mainstream proposals as they go through the many layers of hierarchy before reaching the policymakers at the higher level. The more radical or transformative proposals that challenge growth dependency, colonial relations, or vested interests are diluted or displaced as they move upward through institutional chains. The filtering process on the way to policymakers was also mentioned in the context of science-policy interface (SPI), leading to skewed SPI in favor of status quo.

A second barrier to socioecological transformations arises from a skewed and often ‘cryptic’ SPI. As interviewees noted, scientific knowledge is progressively simplified as it moves through hierarchical policy processes, with a strong preference for short, clear, and quantifiable outputs. Methodological detail and contextual nuance are frequently relegated to annexes or footnotes that policymakers rarely engage with, leading to partial or misleading interpretations of evidence. This dynamic is further reinforced by the use of simplified indicators and aggregate metrics that obscure structural drivers of socioecological harm, such as overconsumption and unequal resource appropriation. The resulting SPI privileges manageability over accuracy, constraining informed and transformative policy debate.

Closely related to other two is the EC’s sectoral and siloed working culture. Fragmentation across Directorates-General and policy domains obstructs systemic and holistic approaches to socioecological transformations. Issues that cut across climate, biodiversity, trade, development, and justice are routinely addressed in isolation, reinforcing narrow problem framings and preventing integrated responses to complex socioecological crises. This siloed organization further limits the capacity to address the interlinked structural drivers of injustice, overconsumption, and ecological harm.

These constraints are intensified by short-term mandates and contracts, which produce temporal horizons misaligned with the long-term nature of socioecological transformations. Short political cycles, project-based funding, and time-bound mandates incentivize incremental and immediately demonstrable outcomes over structural change. As a result, policy actors operate within compressed timeframes that discourage engagement with transformative agendas whose impacts are uncertain, contested, or politically risky. Together, hierarchy, silos, and short-termism form a structural barrier that systematically favors continuity and manageability over radical socioecological transformation.

4.2. Political–strategic barriers: geopolitics, risk, and institutional self-preservation

A second cluster of barriers to socioecological transformations is political–strategic in nature and relates to how geopolitical dynamics, institutional risk management, and mandate design shape the scope of EU green policy. While analytically distinct, these barriers are mutually reinforcing and collectively discipline what forms of socioecological change are considered politically acceptable.

A first political–strategic barrier concerns geopolitics, war, and intensified global competition. As shown in the empirical analysis, the GT is increasingly framed as a strategic project aimed at securing energy independence, access to critical raw materials, and technological leadership in a context of geopolitical instability. Within this framing, socioecological transformations are evaluated primarily in terms of their implications for competitiveness, security, and strategic autonomy. Justice-oriented or post-growth approaches that could undermine economic or geopolitical positioning are therefore treated as politically unviable.

Another barrier concerns the reputational risks and fear of losing access within hierarchical institutions. Policy actors described strong incentives to conform to dominant policy narratives and priorities, as advancing proposals associated with degrowth, decolonial responsibility, or structural redistribution was widely perceived as risking professional credibility, institutional trust, or access to decision-making arenas. In this sense, risk aversion operates not only at the level of policy outcomes but also through everyday professional calculations that discourage engagement with politically contentious agendas.

A third, reinforcing barrier lies in the perceived absence of mandates and incentives to engage with justice, degrowth, and socioecological transformations. Importantly, this absence does not emerge as an administrative oversight, but as a strategic outcome of the geopolitical and reputational dynamics described above. By questioning their formal mandates, the EU institutions effectively signal which forms of action are possible and which are avoided. Together, geopolitical pressures, reputational concerns, and mandate design function as political–strategic barriers that actively constrain any transformative potential of EU green policy.

4.3. Corporate lobbying and vested interests

A third barrier to socioecological transformations arises from the pervasive influence of corporate lobbying and vested interests within EU green policymaking. As highlighted by policy actors, powerful industry actors – particularly in sectors central to the GT such as energy, forestry, agriculture, transport, and the bioeconomy – exercise disproportionate influence over policy agendas and the definition of feasible solutions. Corporate lobbying operates in close interaction with hierarchical governance structures and political–strategic risk management. Through formal and informal channels, industry actors gain privileged access to decision-making arenas, shaping both the content and boundaries of policy debate. In this context, proposals aligned with degrowth, DEJ dimensions, or structural redistribution are marginalized not only because they are politically contentious but also because they directly threaten entrenched economic interests. On the contrary, growth-oriented and market-based approaches, and technological means are prioritized over measures that would challenge accumulation, overconsumption, or extractivist supply chains. Corporate lobbying functions as a powerful barrier that stabilizes existing colonial–capitalist relations under the banner of the GT.

4.4. Procedural and bureaucratic barriers: metrics, monitoring, and institutional inertia

A final cluster of barriers to socioecological transformations is procedural and bureaucratic in nature, relating to how EU green policy is operationalized, evaluated, and revised over time. Again, while analytically distinct, they collectively reinforce incrementalism and inhibit the capacity to respond to structural socioecological constrains.

A first procedural barrier concerns the dominance of quantitative, goal-oriented criteria, and monitoring. Policy success is primarily assessed through measurable targets, indicators, and benchmarks, privileging what can be quantified over what is politically or socially transformative. The fixation on monitoring incentivizes narrow, technocratic interventions and discourages engagement with justice, relational change, or systemic transformation, which are difficult to capture through standardized metrics.

A second and last barrier concerns bureaucratic consensus-building and slow policy revision cycles. EU policymaking is characterized by extensive consultation, negotiation, and compromise, which favors lowest-common-denominator outcomes and stabilizes existing policy frames. Combined with infrequent and lengthy policy revision processes, this consensus-oriented bureaucracy results in the persistence of outdated assumptions and instruments, even as socioecological conditions and knowledge evolve. Together, these procedural dynamics lock EU green policy into forms of action that prioritize manageability and predictability over the adaptive, reflexive, and politically contested processes required for socioecological transformations.