Skills Development for the Twin Transition: Building Transnational Skills Ecosystems Through Experimentalist Governance

The twin transition to a green and digital economy is linked to the need for new skills in the workforce. However, given the scale and speed of change, it is challenging for policymakers, employers, and educational institutions to predict what skills will be in demand and how to create them. In addition to strategic uncertainty, European policymakers are confronted with a diversity of national and regional skills systems and a multi-polar power distribution. Based on our governance framework combining the concept of skills ecosystems with experimentalist governance, we find that policymakers rely on experiments to create and sustain transnational skills ecosystems. These enable local actors to cooperate in a bottom-up way and to develop novel skills solutions. We draw on the iterative policy cycle of experimentalist governance to conceptualize the components necessary for governing transnational skills ecosystems. The expanding European Centers of Vocational Excellence are analyzed to illustrate our argument.