Varying coalitions shape climate policy negotiations in the Council of the European Union (EU), which also shape coalitions. An issue-specific coalition of eight member states formed to scrap the market stability reserve once it met 500 million tons of CO2. The formal Visegrad coalition emerged in negotiations on the ETS expansion to road transport and housing. Similarly, during the cars and vans regulation negotiations the formal Nordic and Visegrad coalitions continuously emerge and cooperate with other member states, forming hybrid coalitions. Member states also cooperate outside of the EU. At the Glasgow climate negotiations 12 member states joined an alliance for zero emissions cars and vans. Why do certain types of coalitions form and not others in particular negotiations? Why do some coalitions maintain over time and across negotiation spaces? What leads coalitions to change?

This paper will investigate the intriguing, yet largely underexplored, dynamics of climate coalitions. Given the complex nature of climate change, and the complex and contested nature of the EU’s climate policy paradigm, this paper aims to shed light on three coalition dynamics (formation, maintenance, change) in EU climate policy negotiations. The research asks how do coalitions differ and under what conditions do different types of coalitions form, maintain and change in EU climate policy negotiations?

The research will be conducted in two stages, focusing on four internal and four external climate policy negotiations between 2012 and 2022. First, using specialized press reports (Agence Europe, EUobserver, Politico), video transcripts of public deliberations of the Environment Council and interviews, climate coalitions will be systematically mapped, using longitudinal social network analysis and the igraph package, to gauge the different types and dynamics of coalitions within and between climate policy negotiations. The mappings will be aggregated in five two-year negotiating periods. Secondly, to gauge the different types of coalitions, the mapped coalitions will be characterized based on a set of coalition characteristics derived from the literature (size, scope, formality) to develop an EU climate coalition typology.

Second, crisp set Qualitative Comparative Analysis will be applied to each type of coalition uncovered in in each of the eight cases to discover the sets of conditions that lead to the formation, maintenance, and change of different types of coalitions. Conditions derived from the literature and under consideration include the type (regulatory, informational, economic) and scope (domestic, international) of policy being negotiated, policy salience, negotiation length and voting mechanism used (QMV, unanimity).

The paper looks at how Russia’s war in Ukraine enters into the EU’s climate narrative. The European Union has over time developed a narrative of itself as the global green leader. This narrative has increasingly served as complementary to the EU’s foundational peace narrative. For the peace narrative, the EU’s own violent past served as ‘the other’, whereas for the green leader narrative other world powers less willing to climate action, including the US, China, and Russia have served as ‘the others’. The current war merges the two narratives and put the EU as the peaceful green leader in contrast to the brutal aggression of the authoritarian Russian oil economy. The war discourse, moreover, facilitates the concrete work with the EU’s fit for 55 climate mitigation agenda, and during the second half of 2022, several important milestones were reached.

Political science and related literature is abundant with articles and books seeking to account for the electoral rise (real or perceived) of Radical Right parties (RRPs) in Europe. Authors that have focused on the ‘supply-side’ progmatic and policy stances of RRPs to explain this development have tended to concentrate their analyses on classic territory such as immigration, Islamophobia, Euroscepticism and anti-globalization sentiment. One policy issue that has drawn minimal attention in the literature on the European Radical Right, and one which this paper addresses, is how such parties portray and respond to the ‘climate crisis’ both in terms of policy and rhetoric. Traditionally, European RRPs have tended to be in ‘denial’ or ‘sceptical’ about ‘climate change’, but, as the issue has taken on more salience in recent years (particularly amongst younger voters) to what extent have such parties adapted their stances on the environment?

The paper begins with a discussion of the positioning of European RRPs on ‘climate change’ from an historical perspective, drawing on classic literature such as Inglehart’s Post-materialist Theory to explain the broadly hostile stance of such parties to environmental issues. In the next part of the analysis, the paper focuses on three case studies in countries where RRPs made significant electoral progress in national elections in 2022, namely the French Rassemblement National (RN), the Italian Fratelli d’Italia (FI) and the Swedish Sverigedemokraterna. Drawing on election manifestos, policy documents and leadership speeches, it traces to what extent the policy and rhetoric of the parties on climate change and the environment have changed over the last decade. From here, the paper centres on the 2022 election campaigns in each of the three countries, tracing the salience of the environment and the ‘climate crisis’ as an issue holistically in France, Italy and Sweden, before comparing and contrasting how each of the RRPs portrayed the issue in their respective election campaigns. It discusses the impact of the environment as an issue on their electoral performances and in conclusion, speculates, more generally, how the ‘climate crisis’ is likely to influence European RRPs from a ‘strategic’ perspective in the coming years.

The integration of environmental policy and objectives into other policies is believed to be an adequate response to climate change and related global challenges. As the European Union (EU) recognizes this approach to environmental challenges since the establishment of EU environmental policy in the Single European Act (SEA) in the late 1980s, the aim of this article is to investigate how far the environmental, alternatively climate, policy integration (EPI/CPI) was applied until 2023. The paper analyses the highest political agenda of the EU, the European Council (EUCO) agenda which sets the political strategies and guidelines of the EU activities, and thus it is considered an essential player in EPI/CPI in EU policy-making. The timeline from 1993 to 2023 is chosen to see the dynamics and patterns of EPI/CPI in time. The study examines 131 policy documents – EUCO Conclusions – using the three-leveled content analysis combining deductive and inductive approaches and holistic grading method. The findings state that the degree of EPI alternatively CPI into other EU policies has incrementally increased in 2023 but that there is a limited number and range of policies where this trend was noticed.