Systemic transformation or status quo?

Policy Study

Assessing the potential systemic transformation of the EU Member States’ energy and mobility sectors through their National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs).

The Recovery and Resilience Facility offers EU Member States the opportunity to use EU funds to help them recover from the shock of the pandemic, while also ensuring the resilience of societies. For this to happen, we need to set ambitious targets for the green transition and ensure that there is a sufficient investment to meet them.

The EU is now faced with the challenge of winning both the marathon and the sprint against the crises, without losing sight of long-term goals.

In this policy study, the authors from ZOE Institute for Future-fit Economies look at four EU Member States (Austria, France, Germany, and Spain) for a geographic and socio-economic span, seeking to answer the question: How transformative were Member States’ NRRPs with regard to their contexts and investment needs?

The research focuses on the energy and mobility sectors by looking first at the pre-pandemic context, or status quo. It lays out the investment needs for energy and mobility as described in the 2019 National Energy and Climate Plans and compares this to the investments set out in the National Recovery and Resilience Plans to determine whether sufficient investments were included to reach the goals of the green transition. 

Finally, the energy and mobility components of the National Recovery and Resilience Plans are assessed using the Recovery Index for Transformative Change to determine the transformative potential of these components. 

By assessing both the quantity and quality of change, the research will determine the level of transformation within these Member States’ plans.

This Policy Study is part of the Recovery Watch series of publications. The Recovery Watch is a research that monitors the Recovery and Resilience Facility and assesses its social impact in different countries.

Led by FEPS, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES) and the Institut Emile Vandervelde (IEV), in collaboration with several first-rate research organisations.