Abstract Multilevel governance has been a central feature of EU policy‐making, especially in the context of cohesion policy, where the concept was extensively theorised. Building on insights from long‐standing scientific research on the topic, this article explores the implementation of the recently established Just Transition Fund (JTF), focusing on the nature of the governance arrangements that were designed across EU countries. Specifically, we formulate and test several hypotheses aimed at elucidating whether the JTF has encouraged decentralisation and the empowerment of subnational authorities or, on the contrary, resulted in centralised patterns of policy‐making. We deploy both quantitative and qualitative methods to spell out how competences and responsibilities for managing this fund were distributed between the national and subnational levels and to identify the factors that shaped more or less decentralised patterns of governance. Our findings suggest that although the JTF is grounded in a place‐based rationale, its implementation has been dominated by centralisation path‐dependent domestic governance dynamics.
Domorenok et al. (2026) studied this question.