The role of social dialogue in integrating socio-economic, labour and decarbonization policies

Achieving sustainability within planetary boundaries requires substantial changes in how we produce and consume, and this transformation will affect labour relations. Beyond the ecological imperative, ongoing trends such as geopolitical tensions, consumers’ expectations, the rise of responsible and impact investment, regulatory developments, and workers' expectations in terms of the meaning of work reinforce the call for decarbonising the economy.

Policy and institutional developments during the last legislatures at EU and Belgian levels have attempted to increase the level of integration between climate policies and economic, employment and social policy sectors. This integration attempts build on various processes of concertation and participation of workers, companies and citizens through existing or new social and civil dialogue institutions and fora. On top of the post–Second World War social consensus, which added distributive and social objectives to the classical economic and security functions of the state, our societies now struggle to address and integrate sustainability functions. 

The climate and environmental dimension of sustainability requires compromises that go beyond the topics onto which social partners have focused on in the past. Social dialogue, traditionally understood as negotiations, consultations or exchanges between employers, workers and decision makers on issues relating to economic, employment and social policy, aimed to generate compromises which directly impact those represented at the negotiation table. In the case of climate and transition policies, the consequences are less immediate for participating parties, and above all, the discussions need to extend and consider the interests of parties not directly represented. 

We analysed how these ongoing socio-ecological changes and transformations have reconfigured the social dialogue in Belgium and how has the social dialogue in Belgium been able (or not) to provide policy integration across climate, employment, and social policy sectors. In other words, we strive to understand how the Belgian social dialogue evolves into a social-ecological dialogue at the federal level. 

Read the policy brief here

Key messages

1. Social dialogue in its different dimensions and levels of intensity remains one of the primary institutional avenues for democratically governing the transition.
2. Difficulty in reaching consensus amid increasing ecological, social, and economic constraints risks favouring more direct modes of governance that bypass social concertation.
3. Appropriating environmental and climate issues alongside economic and social concerns is essential for social concertation to maintain its relevance and influence in policymaking.
4. Social concertation processes that address redistributive and social issues can also serve as mechanisms to integrate environmental issues within economic decisions.

Integration of environmental issues into federal-level social dialogue institutions in Belgium remains limited and marked by fragmentation.