How National and Regional Partnership plans can support just transition regions in the next MFF
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Forgetting transition regions in the next EU long-term budget?
The Just Transition Fund (JTF), currently under implementation across all EU member states in 96 territories, represents one of the most significant policy experiments of the current Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF): a dedicated instrument with a mission-driven intervention logic, designed to accompany the structural transformation of regions dependent on carbon-intensive industries.
The European Commission’s proposed 2028–2034 MFF abolishes the JTF as a dedicated instrument. The just transition objective survives in name, but without a ring-fenced budget, a guaranteed territorial targeting or the planning and governance requirements that gave the fund its transformative character.
The stakes extend beyond the regions themselves. The uneven distribution of transition costs risks compounding the growing social discontent fueled by consecutive external shocks, rises in cost of living and disinformation. This threatens EU’s political legitimacy and cohesion as well as the stated objective of building resilience of the new financial architecture. Withdrawing structured public support from transition communities at this moment would deepen that fracture, undermining not only the social acceptability of the transition but the credibility of the EU’s commitment to leave no one behind.
This policy brief, authored by Eliza Barnea and co-produced by FEPS, SOLIDAR and CEE Bankwatch Network, argues that the innovations developed through the JTF are precisely the design features that the NRPP framework needs to deliver on its own stated ambitions of competitiveness, resilience and result-orientation. Rather than starting from scratch, the post-2027 framework should build on what works by integrating these elements into the NRPPs to ensure that transition regions retain adequate, predictable and institutionally grounded support as the EU advances its industrial transformation.
In this policy brief, we propose to integrate five key elements of the JTF in the NRPPs to ensure the continued support for just transition efforts in European regions:
- Targeted territoriality designed around transition impacts
- Place-based planning, multi-level governance and meaningful stakeholder participation embedded as structural governance requirements
- An integrated approach to investment that treats economic, social and ecological objectives as components of a single territorial response
- Allocation conditioned on national climate commitments
- A dedicated support ecosystem for capacity building and knowledge sharing
Read the brief below and on the FEPS website.
