Leaving No One Behind in Transformative Innovation Policy: Directing instruments across multiple levels to reach marginalized communities

As the current climate crisis grows, governments adopt transformative innovation policies, which are directed to give innovation processes a societally desirable strategic orientation. Put differently, such ‘directionality’ allows to design policy in a way that achieves desirable social outcomes. To define scope and give directionality to policies, new concepts or labels emerge. However, as they must be adjusted according to the territory in which they will be applied, these concepts remain nebulous without a widely shared definition, only a broad framework. These concepts tend to gain their importance when they are taken up at the international level, but their implementation often occurs at sub-national levels of government. This requires a vertical transfer of a concept from high levels to lower levels of government. This paper thus asks, how do different levels of governments take transformative innovation policies and corresponding new concepts directed to them from the (supra)national levels and implement them at the local level? It focuses on the Just Transition mechanism by the European Commission. Correspondingly, the emerging concept we study is that of the just transition. Two European countries – Belgium and Poland – are studied through semi-structured interviews. In addition to offering novel insights on the emergence of the Just Transition concept in the European context, this paper thus traces how actors shape the understanding of emerging concepts, decide both what level of government and department will manage them, and who is involved in the policy implementation.