RRPE Annual Best Paper Award for the year 2022 goes to Professor Andriana Vlachou and Researcher Georgios Pantelias

Each year, the RRPE editorial board selects the best paper from the among those papers published in the previous volume year. The winner receives a check from Sage. Free access to the full version of the current award-winning paper is available for 60 days on the SAGE website.

Current Recipient
2021, volume 53: “The EU Emissions Trading System in Crisis-Ridden Greece: Climate under Neoliberalism” by Andriana Vlachou and Georgios Pantelias, 53 (1): 35–57. Neoliberal capitalism has extended the use of markets to address climate and energy issues. Carbon trading characteristically exemplifies the neoliberalization of climate policy. This paper discusses the workings of the European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) in the European Union (EU) with a focus on its application in crisis-ridden Greece. Beyond environmental effectiveness and distributional effects, the paper explores the interactions of the EU ETS with crisis, austerity programs, energy poverty, and uneven development. Despite adjustments and changes, the EU ETS continues to indicate limited environmental effectiveness and unjust distributional effects. Moreover, by forging a centralized neoliberal transition to a low-carbon economy without consideration of the issues faced by unevenly developed and crisis-stricken EU members such as Greece, the EU ETS leads to additional disturbances and problems for the Greek economy as a whole, its pauperized working people, and its energy and climate options to reduce emissions on its own potential, needs, and priorities.

More info: https://urpe.org/the-journal/awards/annual-best-paper/