Building a Hybrid Forum to bridge low-carbon and labour market transitions. WP4 - LAMARTRA project

The research question of the LAMARTRA project is: ‘How to understand the ongoing and future developments of the low-carbon and labour transitions, and which governance strategies are available in Belgium to ensure the joint pursuit of climate targets and ‘just’ work and employment? This document connects to Work Package (WP)4 ‘Anticipating low-carbon/labour pathways in salient selected sectors’. It is a deliverable part of Task 4.1 ‘Literature Review: inventory of anticipated transitions’, which reports an ‘Internal research note foresight studies of transitions and change in labour market’ (D.4.1.1).
The aim of this WP is to develop desirable low-carbon/labour futures and the pathways to reach them, for each of the four cases of the LAMARTRA project, through the conceptualization and the setting up (and its management) of a foresight exercise. The ambition of this foresight exercise is to move beyond continuity-based (Raskin & Swart, 2020), business-as-usual exercises focusing on either the environmental or the labour aspects and expert-dominated, ‘technocratic’ foresight that ignores situated experiences, fears and hopes of transitions. By contrast, the foresight exercise as we see it encompasses both the environmental and labour aspects of transitions and includes both expert and non-expert knowledge. It also seeks to bridge quantitative (WP3) and qualitative data (WP4), and to inform consistent and comprehensive transitions strategies and federal-level policies (cross-sectorial, multi-level governance, short- and long-term).