Analysing transitions towards sustainability and human development in European regions

Rising social inequalities, environmental degradation and climate change are increasingly acknowledged as major threats to the long-term prosperity of modern economies. Significant attention has thus been placed on sustainability transitions in European policymaking to drive change towards a more inclusive and environmentally sustainable socio-economic system. Alongside these policy initiatives and frameworks, there has also been a rise in European tools for monitoring and measuring progress in different domains. The objective of this paper is to analyse the sustainability transition at the regional level in Europe based on a theoretical framework which links the main pillars of the sustainable development paradigm (in line with the 2030 agenda) with those of the human development paradigm. Using a dataset constructed at the nomenclature of territorial units for statistics (NUTS)2 level for 2010–2019, the Sustainable Development and Human Development Index (SDHD) is developed and a spatial and econometric analysis is applied to identify spatio-temporal trends, clustering and the main determinants and spatial spillovers among the index dimensions. This contributes to the relative gap in studies covering multiple domains of sustainability across all European regions. Results highlight strong regional inequalities in both the SDHD and four domains across Europe, with a noticeable core–periphery divide. There is evidence of convergence across the EU-27, with Eastern European regions scoring the lowest but improving the most. From a spatial fixed-effects regression model, we find significant spatial dependence among neighbouring regions and that gender gaps in the labour market, teenage fertility rates and low educational attainment are significant negative determinants of SDHD.