Publications
Conceptualising the environmental dimension of left-behind places
single author (Ecological Economics, 2025)
This analysis aims at conceptualizing the environmental dimension of left-behind places. I argue that implementing environmental inequality concepts into economic geography is pivotal to sharpen the analysis of just transition geographies. Adopting such lens (1) helps to grasp the theoretical underpinnings of environmental inequalities, (2) lays bare the stratification of environmental risks in left-behind places, (3) helps overcome the environment-vs-jobs narrative. Overall, I lay out how environmental inequality exacerbates economic deprivation, together producing and reproducing left-behind places. Taken together, economic geography studies would profit from putting environmental inequality at its core. This conceptualization has important policy implications around labour-focused just transitions.
Environmental inequality in industrial brownfields: Evidence from French municipalities
with Michael Ash and James K. Boyce (Ecological Economics, 2024)
Recent research on environmental inequality has extended its focus from ongoing pollution to legacy pollution by examining the geography of industrial brownfields, defined as nonproductive, contaminated land. This article is the first extensive brownfield analysis for a European country from an environmental inequality perspective, exploiting the political momentum in France where brownfield restoration has become a national priority. In doing so, we combine data on over 7,200 industrial brownfields from the 2022 geodatabase ‘Cartofriches’ with socio-economic variables at the municipality level. We demonstrate communities with higher percentages of foreign-born and unemployed persons are disproportionately more likely to be located near brownfields. The social gradient increases significantly in communities that host many brownfields, the so-called hotspots. There is an inverted U-shaped relationship with income, with a positive correlation until the 75th percentile (€23,700 annually). These findings are robust to different controls, including across urban and rural areas, though with regional differences. Further, we also account for the location of noxious industrial facilities sourced from the E-PRTR database to show the existence of cumulative impacts of environmental risks. Our analysis provides crucial entry points for restorative environmental justice considerations and has important implications for Europe’s just transition and cohesion policies.
Toxic pollution and labour markets: Uncovering Europe’s left-behind places
with Maria Enrica Virgillito (Review of Regional Research, 2024)
This paper looks at the nexus between toxic industrial pollution and the spillovers from the plant’s production activities, leading to regional lock-ins. Geolocalised facility-level data from the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (E-PRTR) are used to calculate annual chemical-specific pollution, weighted by its toxicity. We combine the latter with regional data on employment, wages and demographics sourced from Cambridge Econometrics, covering more than 1.200 NUTS-3 regions in 15 countries, over the period 2007-2018. We employ quantile regressions to detect the heterogeneity across regions and understand the specificities of the 10th and 25th percentiles. Our first contribution consists in giving a novel and comprehensive account of the geography of toxic pollution in Europe, both at facility and regional level, disaggregated by sectors. Second, we regress toxic pollution (intensity effect) and pollutant concentration (composition effect) on labour market dimensions of left-behind places. Our results point to the existence of economic dependence on noxious industrialization in left-behind places. In addition, whenever environmental efficiency-enhancing production technologies are adopted this leads to labour-saving effects in industrial employment, but positive spatial spillovers at the regional level. Through the lens of evolutionary economic geography our results call for a new political economy of left-behind places.
Unions and industrial policies in transition: the case of industria italiana autobus
with Angelo Castellani, Emanuela La Rocca, Gianluca Sala (Economia e Società Regionale, 2024)
In Italia i trasporti sono uno dei principali settori responsabili delle emissioni di CO₂ annue, con la mobilità privata responsabile del 70% delle emissioni dei veicoli su gomma. La transizione ecologica, che include l’elettrificazione dei mezzi di trasporto e il potenziamento del trasporto pubblico da parte dello Stato, è cruciale per ridurre queste emissioni. Il presente contributo analizza il ruolo della Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici (Fiom) nella crisi aziendale di Industria Italiana Autobus (Iia), focalizzandosi sull’agenda sindacale in materia di transizione ecologica e politiche industriali. La ricerca si basa su interviste semi-strutturate con membri della Fiom di Bologna e Avellino. I risultati della ricerca mostrano una visione comune della transizione come un’opportunità per migliorare l’occupazione e produrre beni socialmente utili; non come una minaccia, ma come un mezzo per garantire un futuro sostenibile, promuovendo alleanze tra sindacati e movimenti ambientalisti.
Industriepolitik und Sektoren der Transformation – ein Blick auf strukturschwache Regionen
Book chapter for the German Jahrbuch Ökonomie und Gesellschaft 2024
Dieser Beitrag behandelt Rahmenbedingungen und Politiken einer sozial-ökologischen Transformation strukturschwacher Industrieregionen in Europa. Strukturschwäche wird hier als relative sozioökonomische Benachteiligung verstanden und mit der räumlichen Verteilung von Industriestandorten in Verbindung gebracht. Im Fokus steht die Frage, wie umweltbelastende Industrien in den Bereichen Energieerzeugung, Metallverarbeitung, Mineralindustrie und chemische Industrie regionale Ungleichheiten verstärken. Der Fokus auf solche Industrieregionen offenbart eine Spirale industriell-technologischer Lock-ins und hoher Umweltverschmutzung. Diese wirtschaftliche Abhängigkeit führt zu einer verzögerten oder vertagten Konversion, vor allem, wenn der Konversionsprozess als Bedrohung für die bestehende Beschäftigungssituation wahrgenommen wird. Der Beitrag stellt verschiedene Mechanismen zur Analyse von Umweltungerechtigkeit und räumlichen Machtverhältnissen vor und erörtert die Rolle von Arbeit und Technologie im kapitalistischen System. Wirtschaftliche Nöte und regionale Disparitäten können außerdem einen fruchtbaren Nährboden für rechtspopulistische Narrative schaffen. Ebenso wird erläutert, wie bestehende Klimapolitik die verteilungspolitischen Auswirkungen von Globalisierung und Delokalisierung multipliziert. Es wird argumentiert, dass ohne glaubwürdige Kompensation weitere politische Gegenreaktionen zu erwarten sind. Abschließend werden mögliche Konversionsstrategien für strukturschwache Regionen diskutiert, mit besonderem Fokus auf die Einbeziehung der Arbeitenden und historische Lernprozesse, um eine ökologische Klassenpolitik zu fördern. Dabei werden die kapitalismuskritischen Schriften des Arbeiterkollektivs von Porto Marghera sowie die Arbeitskämpfe um den Stahlstandort Ruhregebiet aufgegriffen. Das Ziel solcher Strategien ist die Reartikulation des Dilemmas „Arbeitsplätze versus Umwelt“ und die Schaffung von Allianzen zwischen Arbeitenden und Klimabewegung. Dabei ist es entscheidend, die Produktionsverhältnisse in den Mittelpunkt zu stellen und tiefgreifende qualitative Veränderungen in der Produktion zu fordern.
Exposure to International Trade Lowers Green Voting and Worsens Environmental Attitudes
with Valentina Bosetti, Italo Colantone and Maurizio Zanardi (Nature Climate Change, 2023)
From a political perspective, advancing green agendas in democracies requires obtaining electoral support for parties and candidates proposing green platforms. It is therefore crucial to understand the factors driving green voting and attitudes. Yet, limited research has explored the role of economic determinants in this context. In this study we show that globalization, through the distributional consequences of import competition, is an important determinant of support for parties proposing green platforms. Our analysis covers the United States and 15 countries of Western Europe, over the period 2000–2019, with trade exposure measured at the level of subnational geographic areas. We find that higher trade exposure leads to lower support for more environmentalist parties and to more sceptical attitudes about climate change. Our empirical findings are in line with the theoretical channel of deprioritization of environmental concerns, as trade-induced economic distress raises the salience of economic issues.