Realities of the Twin Transition: EU Research Funding, Artificial Intelligence, and Techno-Optimism

Nitschke, J. (2023)

Abstract

This paper critically examines the European Union’s Twin Transition—the joint green and digital transformation—as a discursive and political project that prioritizes technological solutions while obscuring structural pathways for socio-ecological change. Drawing on poststructuralist discourse theory and narrative-based policy analysis, it shows how EU institutions frame digitalization as an essential enabler of the Green Transition, thereby steering policy debates toward efficiency gains and techno-optimistic imaginaries rather than systemic transformation.

By analyzing key EU strategy documents, including the European Green Deal, the Recovery and Resilience Facility, and the Strategic Foresight Report on “Twinning the green and digital transitions,” the paper demonstrates that the Green and Digital Transitions are neither symmetrical nor mutually dependent in the way policy discourse suggests. While the Green Transition is driven by urgent ecological constraints and requires politically contested structural choices, the Digital Transition primarily reflects an industrial competitiveness strategy with open-ended technological pathways.

The paper argues that presenting these transitions as “twins” performs an argumentative inversion: instead of recognizing that digital industrial policy depends on ecological stability, the EU frames ecological sustainability as dependent on digital innovation. This discursive move reinforces a form of techno-solutionism that defers political decision-making, downplays the material and ecological costs of digital technologies, and reproduces green growth assumptions despite mounting evidence of their limits.

Ultimately, the Twin Transition discourse functions as an epistemic postponement strategy, offering technological imaginaries as substitutes for confronting the structural drivers of ecological crisis. The paper concludes that without addressing production structures, consumption patterns, and power relations, the Twin Transition risks reproducing the very socio-ecological contradictions it claims to resolve.

Keywords

twin transition, artificial intelligence, EU research funding, techno-optimism, political economy of innovation, digitalization, green transition

Citation

Nitschke, J. (2023). Realities of the Twin Transition: EU Research Funding, Artificial Intelligence, and Techno-Optimism. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference on Alternative Economic Policy in Europe (Euromemo).

Links

• https://euromemo.eu/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Nitschke_Realities-of-the-Twin-Transition.pdf