Conference Agenda

European Union (EU) environmental legislative processes are structured by varying types of coalitions. Such coalition types differ in their composition, including the number and type of policy actors that are members of the coalition, the number of shared preferences among coalition members, the coalitions’ resources, and the intensity of intra-coalition coordination. Once formed, these coalitions compete against one another to try and influence policy outcomes in their favor, resulting in policy progress or stalemate. Yet, coalitions do not form in a void but are shaped by the policymaking processes and characteristics of the legislative proposals being negotiated and which they seek to influence. To account for and explain why different types of coalitions form and structure EU environmental legislative processes, this paper asks: during EU environmental legislative processes, under what legislative characteristics do different types of coalitions form?

Drawing on the Advocacy Coalition Framework and EU interest group literature, the article considers four legislative characteristics – salience, complexity, newness, and the addressee scope – to explain how variation in these legislative characteristics influence the formation of different coalition types. Drawing on interviews, policy documents, and specialized press reports, the article uses social network analysis and content analysis to identify coalitions and characterize them in the policymaking processes of the European Climate Law, the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, the Renewable Energy directive, the Sustainable Batteries regulation, and the Just Transition Fund. Then, the cross-legislative comparison of the identified coalition types centers on a crisp-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis.

Contemporary European politics is marked by the dual influence of rising Euroscepticism and ambitious climate goals under the European Green Deal (EGD). While Euroscepticism and populism reshape European integration debates, the EGD aims to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, representing a transformative agenda for the EU's economy and energy sector. Our paper explores the interplay between these dynamics, focusing on how Eurosceptic narratives address the EGD within parliamentary debates in Czechia, Poland, and Slovakia. It means countries where Eurosceptic and populist forces have significant influence and where the EGD is a prominent public issue.

Our research applies the Narrative Policy Framework to analyze how policymakers strategically use narratives to support or oppose the EGD, differentiating between hard and soft Eurosceptic perspectives. By combining qualitative and quantitative methods, we examine the distinctions in policy narratives across the selected countries and concrete political parties. The paper also highlights a shift in Euroscepticism from ideological opposition to the EU (period 2015–2020) to a renewed focus on economic concerns, as exemplified by debates surrounding the EGD’s impact on national economies and the single market.

Our paper contributes to a nuanced understanding of Eurosceptic narratives, revealing variations in ideological perspectives and strategic approaches across Central European political parties. It also underscores the role of narratives in shaping public discourse, influencing policy decisions, and addressing the evolving tensions between European integration and domestic political agendas.

Recent media reports and assessments of EU institutions indicate that Bulgaria has struggled to meet the decarbonization goals set out by the EU. This inertia of the country’s coal-based political-economic regime – or carbon lock-in, as referred to by Seto et al. (2016) – is intriguing and worth exploring: one would expect that as one of the latest arrivals to the EU and the poorest member state, Bulgaria will seek to take the maximum advantage of EU resources available for energy transition.

This paper aims to account for the slow pace of Bulgaria’s decarbonization. Building on the Jessopian theory of state and recent scholarship on electoral risks related to greening policies, it shows that Bulgaria’s carbon lock-in is the result of both institutional factors and actors’ agency. The coal-based regime persists thanks to the continued involvement of the Bulgarian state, which has actively subsidized coal mines and coal-fired power plants, generated discourses in their support and granted privileged access to social actors representing the sector. The brown status quo has remained unchallenged by the country’s political actors as the exceptionally high frequency of electoral contests has discouraged them from pursuing bold and potentially unpopular reforms. Political actors’ idleness and administrative inaction have further boosted the determination of pro-coal social forces to defy the decarbonization agenda, resulting in considerable delays – and sometimes even reversals – of the coal exit process.

The limited progress of decarbonization in other Central-Eastern European (CEE) countries suggest that Bulgaria’s carbon inertia, if extreme, is no exception. Therefore, in addition to green-target-setting, the EU should launch information campaigns tailored for specific national circumstances and accessible to local constituencies. In the absence of a comprehensive communication strategy, green transition and other EDG-related policies will continue to be viewed as the ‘Brussels agenda’, enabling pro-coal social forces across the region to capitalize on transition-related concerns and delay decarbonization efforts. At the same time, the EU should strengthen the capacity of national-level administrations to implement coal phaseout, especially in member states where governance quality has been low. In the absence of such assistance, pro-status quo actors in CEE may continue blocking national-level decarbonization measures, leading to an uneven and unjust energy transition in the EU.

This paper investigates how European Parliament’s Party Groups (EPGs) modulated their discursive positionality across divisive policies of the European Green Deal (EGD) which best exemplify the trade-off between environmental protection and economic costs. Over the course of the 9^th legislature (2019-2024), political support for the EGD evolved significantly: the initial enthusiasm for ambitious climate policies (2019–2021) gave way to growing resistance (2022–2024), as right-wing EPGs capitalised on the increasing sectoral resentment as a way to reframe the policy direction of the EGD strategically. The research endorses a Strategic-Relational Approach (SRA) that highlights the recursive relationship between structure and political agency; in short, existing structures privilege certain political strategies, while those strategies are themselves calculated to either reproduce or reshape the structural context. Against this theoretical backdrop, the research assesses the discursive evolution in response to three exogenous shocks that occurred during the legislature: namely, the COVID-19 crisis, the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, and the launch of the Inflation Reduction Act. EPGs are selected across the economic and transnational cleavages to provide insights into different political agencies and strategic rationales. Empirically, the study focuses on two case studies that illustrate the economic-environmental trade-off, namely biodiversity conservation policy and sustainable investment. The selection of agencies and case studies is reinforced by a preliminary analysis of EPGs’ manifestos (2019-2024) to detect the ideological fault lines of EPGs and potential shifts in the positional/rhetorical framing of programmatic ideas; next, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is applied to plenary debates, drawing on a corpus of speeches delivered across the selected timeframe and based on voting behavior.