The Periféria Center, in collaboration with the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography (Leipzig, Germany); the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Athens, Greece); Fair Energy Politics Collective (Tbilisi, Georgia); the Solidarity Economy Center (Budapest, Hungary); and the Hellenic Ornithological Society (Athens, Greece), is working on a project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation's program "Transformational Knowledge on Democracies under Change – Transdisciplinary Perspectives", from March 2025, to February 2030. 

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Eastern and Southern EU member states and their immediate neighbors face significant challenges in implementing the European Green Deal (EGD). New green projects often generate discontent because they mobilize conflicting social interests and exacerbate existing problems of uneven development. Grassroots resistance to the negative local impacts of such projects is often repressed rather than democratically integrated.

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Against this background, the project team, consisting of urban and regional geographers, sociologists, and practitioners from civil society organizations, investigates how policies and projects related to green transitions transform democratic inclusion and exclusion in Europe's peripheries.

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The team draws on a processual and conflict-oriented understanding of democracy from the political ecology literature. Using activist research approaches and methods such as process tracing, focus groups, field visits, and backcasting exercises, it examines how the perspectives of grassroots movements can be incorporated into EGD policy-making. Public events will be held with grassroots movements and policymakers to develop and share actionable recommendations based on the research findings.