EU climate and energy governance in times of crisis: towards a new agenda

ABSTRACT

The EU has long pursued relatively ambitious climate and energy policies, often against the backdrop of what has been termed the EU ‘polycrisis’. This paper introduces a special issue which seeks to develop a better understanding of why, how and with which consequences the polycrisis and EU climate and energy governance have influenced each other. It draws on a novel framework of five broad crisis trends underlying the polycrisis. Most of the contributions suggest that EU climate and energy governance have advanced significantly despite, and sometimes even because of, the crisis trends. The countervailing effects of the trends and the effectiveness of actors’ strategies to advance EU policy against opponents go a long way to explaining this puzzling finding. As the EU seeks to fully decarbonise itself by 2050, interactions with the crisis trends are likely to intensify in ways which future research could fruitfully investigate.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate policy
• crisis
• energy policy
• European integration
• populism

Acknowledgements

This article and special issue were prepared in the context of the Jean Monnet Network Governing the EU’s climate and energy transition in turbulent times (GOVTRAN: www.govtran.eu), with the support of the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union. We would like to thank the other special issue contributors for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article, and the journal editors for their patient guidance and support. Ingmar von Homeyer and Sebastian Oberthür gratefully acknowledge support by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel’s strategic research programme ‘Evaluating Democratic Governance in Europe’. Andrew Jordan gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the ESRC CAST centre and the ERC project DeepDCarb.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)).

Notes

1 Throughout this article, we use the term (climate/climate and energy) ‘governance’ to denote the sum of all relevant policies and related policymaking.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Commission.

Notes on contributors

Ingmar von Homeyer

Ingmar von Homeyer, PhD, is senior researcher at the Brussels School of Governance, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Sebastian Oberthür

Sebastian Oberthür is professor of environment and sustainable development at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and professor of environmental policy and law at the University of Eastern Finland.

Andrew J. Jordan

Andrew Jordan is professor of environmental policy in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia.