Dr. Despoina Kanteler (p), Prof Lefteris Topaloglou, Mrs. Maria Adamakou, Dr. Nikos Kapitsinis

The green and digital transitions are reshaping regional labour markets across Europe, generating simultaneous processes of job creation and destruction and creating significant territorial disparities. These dynamics challenge traditional policy design approaches, which often rely on top-down planning and limited stakeholder engagement. In response, participatory and place-based approaches are increasingly recognized as essential for designing effective and socially inclusive transition policies. This paper presents a methodological and analytical framework for understanding Living Labs as instruments of policy co-creation in regions undergoing labour market restructuring. Living Labs are conceptualized as open innovation ecosystems in which policymakers, firms, workers, educational institutions, and civil society collaboratively identify challenges, design solutions, and test interventions in real-life settings. The paper argues that such environments improve the relevance, feasibility, and legitimacy of policy measures by incorporating diverse forms of knowledge, including local experience, institutional expertise, and labour market intelligence. The analysis draws on evidence from the ISABEL project, which establishes Living Labs in multiple European regions to address job creation and destruction and skills transitions in the context of the green and digital transformations. The proposed framework highlights three key mechanisms through which Living Labs contribute to policy design: structured stakeholder engagement, iterative experimentation and feedback loops, and the integration of qualitative and quantitative evidence. These mechanisms enable the identification of region-specific labour market challenges and the co-development of context-sensitive policy responses. The findings suggest that Living Labs can serve not only as research environments but also as governance instruments that strengthen multi-level coordination and support place-based policy innovation. By bridging the gap between policy formulation and implementation, Living Labs provide a structured pathway for translating territorial knowledge into actionable strategies, contributing to more resilient and inclusive regional labour markets.

Prof. Lefteris Topaloglou (p), Dr Despoina Kanteler, Mrs Maria Adamakou, Mr Dimitris Mavromatidis, Prof. Nikos Kapitsinis

The accelerated phase-out of coal and lignite under the European Green Deal is generating significant labour market disruptions in coal-dependent regions. Western Macedonia in Greece—one of Europe’s fastest decarbonisation cases—offers a critical setting to examine how labour market restructuring can be managed under conditions of structural vulnerability and policy urgency. This paper presents empirical evidence from the Western Macedonia Living Lab, established within the Horizon Europe ISABEL project, as a platform for stakeholder engagement and place-based policy experimentation. Drawing on interviews, participatory workshops, and regional labour market analysis, the study explores employment dynamics, job displacement risks, emerging skill needs, governance capacity, and the effectiveness of transition measures. Particular attention is given to institutional coordination, social acceptance, and gender implications. Findings suggest that although strategic frameworks and funding instruments such as the Just Transition Fund provide essential support, uncertainties persist regarding job creation, skill alignment, and governance inclusiveness. The paper argues that effective labour market transformation requires place-based governance, sustained stakeholder engagement, and adaptive institutional capacity, demonstrating the value of Living Lab methodologies for evidence-based decision-making in just transition contexts.

Prof. Maria Tsouri (p), Evangelia Petraki, Ahmed Amine El Azhary, Prof. Simon Norheim Colclough, Prof. Andreas Panagopoulos, Prof. Panagiotis Skartados

The twin green and digital transition has become a central organising principle of contemporary European policymaking, particularly in the domain of labour markets and skills. Yet, despite the proliferation of strategies, action plans, and regulatory instruments, there is limited understanding of how policy actors themselves conceptualise labour-market change, risk, and intervention across governance levels. This paper addresses this gap through an inductive, theory-building analysis of European, national, and regional policy documents using Gioia methodology supported by large language models (LLMs).
Empirically, the study analyses a large corpus of policy texts related to employment, skills, education, and industrial transformation. LLMs are used to assist first-order coding by identifying recurring policy concepts, framings, and narratives at scale, while preserving traceability to original texts. These first-order categories are subsequently interpreted through the Gioia approach to develop second-order themes and aggregate dimensions that capture dominant policy logics and underlying assumptions about labour-market adjustment in the twin transition.
The analysis reveals systematic differences in how labour-market challenges are framed across governance levels, ranging from competitiveness- and innovation-driven narratives at the European level to more place-sensitive and inclusion-oriented framings at national and regional levels. At the same time, tensions emerge between policy aspirations for coordinated twin-transition strategies and fragmented approaches to skills, reskilling, and worker protection.
The paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it advances methodological innovation by integrating LLMs into Gioia-based qualitative analysis of policy systems. Second, it offers a multi-level conceptualisation of labour-market policymaking under the twin transition. Third, it provides theoretical insights into policy coherence, institutional sensemaking, and the governance of labour-market transformation in Europe.