An ambitious, transformative environmental policy aiming at structural change impacts employment and income. The systems at stake for transition, e.g. the energy, the transportation, the food system, or cities, often are not only ecologically dysfunctional, but so they are socially. Designing social change, thus, is an incentive of environmental organizations, labor unions, social associations and charity. Do conflicts of interests prevail amongst them, or can commonalities be detected? Following this question, the project "Identifying new social political allies and association strategies for environmental policy” examined, how alliances of different agents evolve and how they can be mobilized for sustainability transitions.

As two of the results, the interim report “New alliances for sustainability policy – systematizing the social dimension of environmental policy” and the final report “Potentials, challenges and perspectives of new alliances for socio-ecological transitions" were elaborated and now published by the Federal Environmental Agency.

The interim report on the systematization of the social dimension of environmental policy investigates the interface of the ecological and the social sphere. As environmental policy inevitably affects the social realm both in terms of its aspirations and regarding its impacts, a systematic understanding of the social meaning of environmental policy constitutes a pivotal issue for respective agents.

The final report presents the essential project results on the analysis of existing cooperative strategies of environmental agents with unions, social and charity associations, of their further conceptual development, and its exemplary testing. The report considers the (not-)materialization of alliances from (a) a political-institutional perspective, (b) from the viewpoint of the different agents' action logics, and (c) from the viewpoint of their differing future images and expectations.