The Twin Green and Digital Transition: Between Political Vision and Ecological Illusion

Rüppell Korhaan

13-10-2025

Kingfisher tilts his head. “I dive. I catch fish. I know what’s real because I touch it. You dream. Is that knowing?”
Zhuangzi chuckles. “You know the water. I know the dream. Different ways of knowing.”

In Kingfisherish Wandering [1]

© Wix

In a recent study, Kovacic and colleagues [2] critically examine the European Union’s (EU) flagship vision of merging the green and digital transitions—a policy narrative promising that technology and sustainability can advance hand in hand toward a carbon-neutral future. Through an interpretative analysis of EU Green Deal documents, Strategic Foresight Reports, and Member States’ recovery plans, the authors explore how and why this “twin transition” has been legitimized despite its deep contradictions.

EU institutions use the “digital imaginary”—an idealized belief in technological innovation—to reconcile long-standing tensions between economic growth and environmental sustainability. This imaginary allows policymakers to reframe trade-offs as “win-win” scenarios, transforming complex ecological problems into issues of efficiency, data, and digital optimization [3-6]. For example, digital technologies are presented as enablers of clean energy grids, circular economies, and precision agriculture, even when their own energy demands, e-waste, and resource dependencies (e.g., lithium, cobalt) exacerbate ecological stress.

Kovacic et al. show that the twin transition is less a scientific necessity than a political response to Europe’s “polycrisis”—from the 2008 financial collapse to COVID-19 and the Ukraine war [7]. By promising digital and green growth simultaneously, the EU reclaims legitimacy through visions of progress and control, echoing Latour [8]’s concept of hybridization, where science, technology, and politics merge. This discourse allows the EU to appear both technologically competitive and morally green, while sidestepping the hard choices of post-growth transformation.

Viewed through the lens of Nature Quotient (NQ), the twin transition reveals a paradox of desperate modernity [9]. Knowing that digital fixes cannot solve the root causes of ecological crises, yet relying on them as if they could. Cultivating high NQ requires moving beyond technological optimism toward reflective governance, where progress is measured not by innovation rates but by restored balance between human ambition and planetary limits.

In this sense, genuine individual and social peace emerges not from data-driven control but from humility—recognizing that sustainability cannot be coded or optimized but must be lived through care, restraint, and shared stewardship of Earth’s systems [10].

References

[1] Nguyen MH. (2025). Kingfisherish Wandering. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FVLLLXNW/ 

[2] Kovacic Z, et al. (2024). The twin green and digital transition: High-level policy or science fiction? Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 7(6), 2251-2278. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241258046

[3] Rommetveit K, Wynne B. (2017). Technoscience, imagined publics and public imaginations. Public Understanding of Science, 26, 133-147. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963662516663057

[4] Kloppenburg S, et al. (2022). Scrutinizing environmental governance in a digital age: New ways of seeing, participating, and intervening. One Earth, 5, 232-241. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2022.02.004

[5] Castoriadis C. (1987). The Imaginary Institution of Society. MIT Press.

[6] Taylor C. (2004). Modern Social Imaginaries. Duke University Press.

[7] Zeitlin J, Nicoli F, Laffan B. (2019) Introduction: The European Union beyond the polycrisis? Integration and politicization in an age of shifting cleavages. Journal of European Public Policy, 26, 963-976. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2019.1619803

[8] Latour B. (1993). We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press.

[9] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH. (2025). On Nature Quotient. Pacific Conservation Biology, 31, PC25028. https://doi.org/10.1071/PC25028

[10] Nguyen MH, Ho MT, La VP. (2025). On “An” (安): Inner peace through uncertainty, nature quotient, and harmony with Dao. http://books.google.com/books/about?id=NIKMEQAAQBAJ