Research project
Competence Centre
- Start date: 1 October 2023
- End date: 30 September 2026
- Principal investigator: Professor Vera Trappmann (Leeds University Business School)
- Co-investigators: Professor Mark Stuart, Dr Felix Schulz (Leeds University Business School), and Professor Milena Buchs (Faculty of Earth and Environment)
- Expert panel: Professor Jennifer Tomlinson, Professor Charles Umney, Dr Ioulia Bessa and Dr Simon Joyce (Leeds University Business School)
Description
Societies are facing big transformations. Academic research can help policy-makers to solve some of the related problems. This Competence Centre aims to provide knowledge and expertise that can be accessed in the short-term to help inform policy-making. Working with social and political stakeholders, we co-design research around climate change and work, decarbonisation and just transition.
Research overview
The Competence Centre contributes to public debate around decarbonisation and just transition. It surveys the public on a regular basis on topics such as energy transition, climate mitigation, skills for decarbonisation, and policies to support a fair and just transition.
The Competence Centre is funded by the Hans Böckler Foundation.
About the team
Vera Trappmann is Professor of Comparative Employment Relations at Leeds University Business School. A sociologist of work, Vera has studied and published widely on the transition from socialism to capitalism in Central and Eastern Europe, the restructuring of large enterprises in Europe (often in the steel sector), and how this affects workers and workers' biographies with a particular focus on precarisation. This equips her perfectly for understanding the challenges that climate change mitigation and adaptation and hence the socio-ecological transformation poses for workers, and how it may affect workers' careers and lives. She works with mixed methods, with longstanding expertise in qualitative and biographical research. Within the Hans-Böckler-Foundation Competence Centre, Vera is looking forward to working with societal stakeholders, trade unions and policy-makers on research that is applicable and contributes to enabling a just and fair transition of decarbonisation.
Felix is an interdisciplinary researcher at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies (LUCSUS), drawing on labour economics, sociology of work and social psychology to understand individuals’ and labour institutions’ perceptions of climate change and just transition policies, and the drivers thereof. Prior to joining LUCSUS, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Employment Relations, Innovation and Change (CERIC), the Digital Futures at Work (digit) Research Centre and the Hans-Böckler-Foundation funded Competence Centre on social-ecological transformations at the University of Leeds, where he remains as a Visiting Research Fellow.
Milena Büchs is Professor of Sustainable Welfare at the Sustainability Research Institute, University of Leeds, UK. Milena's research focuses on sustainable welfare, social-ecological policy and just transitions. Several of her publications also focus on distributional and justice implications of climate policies and measures that improve their distributional outcomes. Milena is currently Co-I of the Horizon Europe project "Towards a Sustainable Wellbeing Economy" (2023-2026), and Co-I of the Horizon Europe project “Models, Assessment & Policy for Sustainability” (2024-2028) in which she will focus on social-ecological policy. Milena has extensive experience working with large representative survey data. At the Competence Centre, she will contribute to designing and analysing a survey on worker attitudes to climate policies, with a focus on fairness implications and social-ecological policy.
Contact: Professor Vera Trappmann
Follow: LinkedIn
Publications and outputs
Reports:
- Hans Böckler Stiftung: working paper – How do employees view the energy transition?, Dr Felix Schulz and Professor Vera Trappmann, October 2024
Media coverage:
- “Conservatives Win in Germany, But New Chancellor Will Be Limited in Ability to Make Big Changes to Climate and Energy Policy”, Inside Climate News, February 2025
- “German election: why most political parties aren’t talking about the climate crisis”, The Conversation, February 2025
- “AfD- und BSW-Wähler lehnen Energiewende mehrheitlich ab” (AfD and BSW voters mostly reject energy transition), Spiegel: Wirtschaft (Speigel: Economy – online), 25 October 2024
- Umfrage: Mehrheit befürwortet Energiewende” (Survey: Majority support energy transition), Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (West German General Newspaper – in print), 29 October 2024