Call for Session

18th ESPAnet Italia Conference 2025

Technology, climate, demographic change: challenges and social policy responses in a world in transition

Politecnico di Torino, 16-18 September 2025

The triple transition - environmental, technological and socio-demographic - represents one of the crucial challenges of our time, forcing rethinking of the relationship of the human species with others, between urban and natural spaces, of production processes and redistribution of resources, and of welfare systems at all levels of governance.

As the reality of climate change becomes alarmingly evident, pressure grows on policymakers and economic and social actors to engage production systems in a serious process of environmental transformation. However, the recent COP29, as well as the new US administration's change of tack, confirm the difficulties inherent in balancing economic development - particularly of emerging countries - and global emissions reduction (Draghi 2024). Environmental transition calls for sectoral adjustments that may bring about new employment, as well as job losses, changes in the skills and job profiles required, and significant consequences in terms of political consensus and demands posed on decision-makers by the political community. At the same time, technological development, and in particular the advent of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), outlines new fundamental risks (Kissinger et al. 2022) or at the very least the reconfiguration of human labour (Mugge 2024), as well as new opportunities for economic growth (Acemoglu 2024). 

The impact of generative AI concerns the manufacturing sector as well as public and private services (from medical diagnostics, to logistics, to services for the unemployed). The use of decision-making processes based on large databases increasingly affects the organization and provision of welfare services, resulting in a difficult balancing act between efficiency and transparency of administrative action, as well as between the expectations of effectiveness resulting from the use of IT systems and the experience and judgement of welfare workers (Van Gerven 2022). 

In the last decade, the ‘fourth industrial revolution’ has seen a renewed interest in industrial policies to revive productive sectors, together with education and social policies: proactive and social investment for skills training, and reactive for compensating impacts. Similarly, the strategy of combating climate change through decarbonization pursued by the European Union gives rise to consequences that must be managed through a mix of policies involving industrial policies, territorial development, education and training, and social policies, in a scenario characterized by the global decline in fertility and population ageing (The Lancet 2024). These issues undermine the sustainability of health and social protection systems and foreshadow a slowdown in economic growth.

In such a context, even more so after the Covid-19 pandemic, public sector intervention is increasingly seen as necessary to seize development opportunities and to support collaboration between research, school, university and industry. However, possible tensions emerge between conceptions of public intervention as aimed at producing resources or rather reallocating them, thus opposing industrial and social policies against each other. Tensions that could be quashed by re-conceptualizing, a quarter of a century later, social policy as a productive and competitiveness factor (European Commission 1997, Pontusson 2005). An angle, however, subject to contestation by those who consider productivist social policy co-extensive with growth capitalism, and part of the problems of modernity rather than their solution, whereas an effective response to the challenges posed by transitions would require a paradigm shift in a ‘post-productivist’ sense (Dukelow and Murphy 2022).

The ESPAnet Italia 2025 conference aims to reflect on the challenges that these interrelated transitions pose to the production system, to resource redistribution mechanisms and to the social policies that respond to, regulate and shape socio-economic processes. While the use of new technologies may facilitate environmental transformation, increasing automation raises concerns about the employment conditions of many workers with obsolete skills, while the shortage of skilled labour resulting from an ageing population and the reduction of younger cohorts generates itself incentives for automation, also in the health and welfare professions (including through the adoption of generative AI). The increasing pressures on the pension and health system due to the demographic transition jeopardize the introduction and provision of compensatory policies for those exposed to new eco-social risks (victims of hydro-geological disruption, workers in the fossil energy supply chain, etc.). At the same time, more vulnerable groups may be less prepared to face the negative consequences of climate change and natural disasters.

The conference promotes sessions that address these issues both from a theoretical and interpretative point of view, and through the presentation of empirical research, case studies and/or comparative analyses, practical experiences, with a focus on present scenarios and future developments. The presentation of new methodologies and techniques of analysis is encouraged, stimulating an interdisciplinary discussion that spans the following disciplines: sociology, economics, political science, history, law, psychology, demography, urban planning, social service, pedagogy and medicine.

The topics to be discussed and on which sessions are invited (in a non-exhaustive list) are:

• Strategies and policies for mitigating the social impacts of the triple transition
• Industrial and labour strategies and policies for environmental transformation and digital transition
• Public perception of major transitions and public policy preferences
• Intergenerational dynamics (conflicts, solidarity, exchanges)
• New forms of living together, long-term care and caregiving 
• Urban transformation and smart and sustainable cities
• Social welfare services, digitization and use of AI
• Family, birth and female employment policies
• Scenario analyses and future studies on new social risks in the triple transition
• Impacts of new technologies and green transition on employment and job quality
• Digital transformation of welfare administration
• Disintermediation, ‘remotization’ and algorithmic decision-making models in labour and social policies
• Training (digital skills and green skills) for labour markets in transition
• ‘Smart’ active labour market policies (use of AI in employment services, demand-supply matching, etc.)
• Role of the third sector and social economy
• Active ageing
• Disability and new technologies
• Climate justice
• Digital transformation and new forms of activism
• New migrations: climate refugees and response policies
• ...

Session proposals (between 250 and 300 words in English or Italian) should be submitted by 24/03/2025 to: Questo indirizzo email è protetto dagli spambots. È necessario abilitare JavaScript per vederlo.

Acceptance of proposals will be communicated by 12/04/2025.