Conference Agenda

Achieving the European Union’s (EU) aim to reach climate neutrality by 2050 requires fundamental economic, political and societal transformations, with potentially profound distributional effects. EU-level policy making will play an important role in this process but has been widely criticised for its lack of democratic legitimacy or its ‘democratic deficit’. This raises the question if EU climate policy making has the necessary democratic legitimacy to drive Europe’s transition, particularly when taking into account the transboundary and transgenerational challenges climate change poses to democracy.

Against this background, this paper assesses the democratic legitimacy of EU climate policy making. To do so, the paper first develops and operationalises ideal-type criteria for democratically legitimate EU climate policy making. The ideal-type criteria are derived from the model of representative democracy and comprise the equal consideration of interests, majority voting, transparency of decision-making, the accountability of decision-makers, and the quality of policy outcomes. Additionally, the ideal-type criteria consider the transboundary and transgenerational challenges climate change poses to democratic governance.

Second, these ideal-type criteria are empirically tested on an illustrative case study of EU climate policy making, namely the 2018 revision of the EU Emissions Trading System. Drawing on process tracing, policy documents and expert interviews, the case study explores to what extent the ideal-type criteria are reflected in the policy making process. The findings indicate that all ideal-type criteria are fulfilled in principle, but significant differences exist. Challenges arise regarding the accountability of decision-makers vis-à-vis the European electorate and the reflection of the democracy-climate nexus. These findings highlight the need for further societal and scholarly discussion on the democratic legitimacy of EU climate policy making.

With the rapidly developing challenge of climate change the call for a greener economy becomes omnipresent. The finance realm plays a key role in this economic transformation and numerous attempts appeared on the global stage calling for a mobilization of financial resources for green activities. Thus, definitions and standards for green finance play a vital role in determining the sustainability of economic activities. However, voluntary commitments such as the ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) indicators did not result in a major push in investments towards green activities. Hence, governmental entities in various countries started to develop binding standards for green economic activities, known as taxonomies. In this regard, this paper will examine those processes ensuing from a European perspective. Hence, it asks how the EU taxonomy is situated within global standardization efforts, how it influences them and vice versa. Hereby, the EU taxonomy is understood as a tool in terms of global climate governance in the financial realm. Although focusing on defining sustainability in economic activities, the interdependencies of the EU taxonomy are situated also within a wider environment of regulatory approaches and policies, such as the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism or the Inflation Reduction Act.

Thus, this paper will first reflect on the sustainable finance literature regarding standardization and introduce the narrative discourse approach. This will be followed by an overview of current global efforts in terms of sustainable finance standards drawing on the Green Finance Measures Database. The paper will then continue with an analysis of relevant documents employing a narrative discourse analysis in order to identify the storylines which appear in the discourse around the global effects and relations of the EU taxonomy. To this end this paper will finally discuss the position of the EU taxonomy in relation to other approaches in the realm of sustainable finance standardization.

Policy systems are often managed by actors constellations that thrive with the status quo, and project a positive image of the way they are managing a certain issue. Changes to practices and routines that develop in such systems are hard to contest, although the Punctuated Equilibrium Framework (PEF) can reveal dynamics in different venues of the policy field. It is relatively unclear how experts are implied in the PEF, and this paper seeks to shed more light on their agency in policy change To this end we examine the case of the Water Framework Directive (WFD), where several experts took their ideas on better ways of managing water to Brussels, and managed to influence EU law [citation removed to annonymize abstract]. But adoption of the WFD – with its unique approach towards implementation (leaving much discretion to members states) was only the start of a policy change trajectory. In this paper we examine how experts were subsequently also implied in implementation of the WFD, and used this critical juncture to steer the trajectory of national regimes in new directions. Our central research question is therefore how the architecture of science-policy networks at the national level has influenced the choices of institutional design, and how such networks have continued to affect the trajectory of national water regimes over time?

We answer this question by performing a cross-case comparison, involving in-depth studies of four EU member states (France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Greece), countries chosen for their diverging contexts. We rely on the PEF to study shifts in national water policy and path dependencies. First, how does the science-policy interface influence the directions for interpreting and implementing the WFD? Reciprocally, how has the adoption of the WFD transformed the science-policy interface around water policy in each country? This has for instance been the case in Greece, where the WFD has enabled ecological expertise to be elevated over chemical expertise. In each country, through interviews with experts and policymakers from the civil society, national expert institutions and government, we identify the types of science-policy interactions (e.g. centralized/decentralized) that are associated with certain evolutions of the WFD principles through time, and in particular those that enable the principles to persist and enhance water protection. This allows us to reveal what science-policy setups have been most effective in improving water quality, and which potential changes might still be needed to overcome remaining domestic implementation challenges.