Symposium Energy Justice and the European Law of Transition Introduction

This symposium brings together six contributions that emerged from the international workshop “Energy Justice in the European Law of Transition”, convened under the auspices of the Amsterdam Centre for European Studies (ACES) at the University of Amsterdam, in collaboration with the School of Law of the University of Camerino. The workshop asked how European legal instruments can support the energy transition without treating affordability, participation, legal certainty, and justice as secondary concerns. That question reflects a broader diagnosis: European energy law is becoming a testing ground for what may be described as a ‘European Law of Transition’. This is an emerging normative framework for governing systemic change at the intersection of climate protection, energy security, geopolitical instability, industrial policy, and social vulnerability. Its starting point is also grounded in the academic literature on energy justice, which has long claimed that energy systems must be assessed through distributional, procedural, and recognition justice lenses (Jenkins et al., 2016; Sovacool and Dworkin, 2015).

The move away from fossil fuels requires new markets, new contracts, new public support mechanisms, new legal subjects, and new modes of administrative decision-making. It also requires law to decide who bears transition costs, who receives transition benefits, who has procedural voice, and who is exposed to environmental, financial, or territorial risk. European law is central to this process. The European Green Deal, the European Climate Law, REPowerEU, the revised Renewable Energy Directive (RED III), the Electricity Market Design Reform and the EU Hydrogen Strategy show that the transition is increasingly governed through dense legal frameworks that allocate power, risk, and responsibility.

The contributions collected here therefore ask a sharper question: what kind of legal framework is emerging through the energy transition? Their answers suggest that transition should be assessed by its effects in terms of affordability, energy poverty, local (energy) communities, participation, accountability, and intergenerational fairness. From that perspective, just transition is also a legitimacy test.