In this short Q&A with ACES Programme Manager Agnė Piepaliūtė, he explains the idea behind his project and what it means for the future of EU governance.

Congratulations on your ERC Starting Grant. Could you tell us what inspired you to explore the idea of “governing loss” in the context of the European Union?

'The project is motivated by the observation that interrelated processes of economic transformation (globalization; technological change, including digitization and AI; and climate change, including efforts to mitigate it) generate intense loss in our societies. Some very concrete stories inspired me: retail stores closing down in rural places in my home country of Italy, leaving workers, consumers, and local communities underserved; fishermen losing their catch due to biodiversity loss and alien species; farmers who need to reduce their livestock to comply with climate mitigation policies; and then there are automation and AI which threaten to displace jobs in many sectors in ways that are still hard to predict. Another source of inspiration was my teaching of competition law - as one of my students insightfully observed: competition sounds very good, but what about those who have to leave the market because they lose in the competitive process - does the law care for them? 'No' is too simple an answer, but it is true in some meaningful way. The intuition of 'governing loss' is that some of this loss may be preventable or at least shaped in ways that are less harmful for individuals and societies. Some loss cannot be eliminated, and here 'governing' would mean accepting to some extent this inevitability, but also better understanding the grievances of the losers, and intervening with more tailored legal or policy solutions.'

Your project suggests that law often lacks the tools to conceptualize and respond to loss. How do you think legal scholarship and policy can begin to address this gap?

'Indeed, another observation that motivates the project is that a large amount of resources and legal programs are devoted to assisting individuals who lose out in the face of rapid change. This is mostly done through compensation, or re-skilling of workers in declining industries. While these are certainly worthy interventions they seem to be insufficient, or there seems to be a mismatch between what these policies deliver and what the ‘losers’ want. First of all, we lose not only as workers, but also as consumers, business-owners, citizens; and loss is felt in family life and community. Furthermore, loss has not only material, but also immaterial components: about status, prestige, sociability, culture. The project aims to disentangle different dimensions of loss, and offer language and concepts that can guide the development of law and policy. This broad conceptualization of loss has one important consequence for my research: the project theorizes from a broader set of legal materials than typically considered when having discussion about ‘losers’ of economic change. As I hypothesize, strategies for governing loss emerge not only in the welfare state or labor law, but a much broader array of areas of the law and regulatory interventions: consumer and competition law; private law; market regulation; forms of participatory governance in administrative law, among others. This is why I am confident to be able to theorize a broader and better array of legal techniques and strategies to address loss in its complex forms.'

You study “loss” across sectors such as agriculture, the automotive industry, and consumer services. What makes these fields particularly revealing for understanding economic transformation?

'One of my aims is to unveil commonalities and differences about how loss is experienced and how it can be governed in different economic sectors, in the face of different transformation drivers. All three sectors experience visible loss-inducing economic transformation, but they also show important differences that make my theory more likely to produce valuable insights. I theorize based on case studies from the primary (agriculture and fisheries), secondary (automotive) and tertiary sector (consumer services like commerce and tourism), so as to rely on a somewhat comprehensive representation of the economy. Furthermore, the three sectors show variation in the combinations of drivers of transformation that affect them. In agriculture and fisheries the effects of climate change and the green transition are most prominent; in the automotive industry, the effects of technological change (automation) and the green transition; in consumer services, I look at trade liberalization (EU induced liberalization) and digitization. Finally, the three sectors show variation in the areas of law implicated in governing loss and who the "losers" are.'

The project seems to have both analytical and normative ambitions, not only to describe but also to assess how societies deal with loss. What broader implications do you see for EU governance and democracy?

'Thanks for this question. Indeed the project aims to both theorize the governance of loss and to show what a good and just governance of loss looks like in different contexts. One of the preoccupations behind the project is that unaddressed economic grievances, and a growing divide between winners and losers, fracture our societies profoundly, making our democratic institutions hard to sustain. There is ample research showing how economic grievances linked to some of the experiences of loss I study drive far-right politics which challenge liberal and democratic institutions. But the project also postulates that there are less contingent, and more normative reasons for assisting losers, about the justice of offering some remedy to ‘loss’ or other social desiderata that this aligns with. Ultimately having good governance of loss is about shaping more just economies and societies. In Europe, EU law and governance have a large role to play in the governance of loss also because they are driver of the loss-inducive transformations I study: liberalization, digitization, green transition are all major EU projects. The EU has to some extent a responsibility to be part of the solution. But also, in EU law and governance we can observe regulatory techniques and arrangements that make the EU well placed to be part of the solution.’

Finally, receiving an ERC Starting Grant is a major milestone. What are you most looking forward to as you begin this five-year research journey?

'I am really humbled to see my work recognized with this grant, and I feel the responsibility to execute it at the best of my ability. I owe very much to my research community, my colleagues at ACELG, and the broader community at ACES and UvA. I look forward to the interdisciplinarity of the project; supervising PhDs with diverse backgrounds and competences which are essential to carry out an ambitious socio-legal project. I also look forward to the debates and scholarly communities that the project will put me in touch with. The project asks genuine questions, to which we have incomplete answers. I look forward to sharpening those answers together with the team.'