Deradicalizing transformations: how EU green transition neutralizes degrowth, justice, and decoloniality

Abstract

Non-Technical Summary The European Union presents its green transition (GT) as a transformative response to climate change and environmental crisis. This article examines whether the current policies live up to that promise, and how transformation is interpreted within the European Green Deal and the EU bioeconomy as flagships of the EU's GT. It shows that while climate urgency and public pressure push for transformations, geopolitical competition, and economic growth-first approach pull policy in a different direction. It shows how transformative concepts, including transformations, degrowth, and (decolonial) justice, get systematically co-opted and deradicalized in the process. Technical Summary This article analyzes how socioecological transformations are interpreted and operationalized within EU green policy, focusing on the European Green Deal and the EU bioeconomy. Drawing on qualitative interviews and a policy workshop with European Commission policy officers, it demonstrates that tensions between the EU's green transition and broader transformative agendas originate at the policy design stage rather than implementation alone. Two contradictory motives shape the EU's engagement with transformation narratives: (i) climate urgency and associated social movements, and (ii) EU's ambition to be(come) important global actor in green transition and decarbonization. While the former opens spaces for transformative change, the latter prioritizes competitiveness, growth, and domination. The article advances the concept of deradicalization to explain how transformative agendas – particularly those associated with degrowth and decolonial environmental justice – are selectively translated, depoliticized, or displaced. Structural, political–strategic, corporate, and procedural barriers reinforce this process, stabilizing capitalist agendas and growth-dependent governance under the language of sustainability and green growth. The analysis argues that such deradicalization inhibits movements and initiatives for more justice-centered, decolonial, and post-growth futures, while enabling continuity of socioecological injustices and (neo)colonial relations within EU green politics.