Contesting the European Union in a changing climate: policy narratives and the justification of supranational governance

Abstract

ABSTRACT Climate change policy is an important test case for how political agents use narratives to address complex policy issues and define its scope and impacts in a multi-level context. Harnessing a theoretical approach based on framing analysis and the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), the article asks to what degree agents at the level of domestic parliamentary discourse expand narrative stories of climate action to agents and institutions at the European level. Empirically, the present study investigates deliberations during the current elective period of the German Bundestag (2017-) on climate change and general EU debates to identify and compare narrative accounts of three groups of agents with opposed ideological views and institutional roles: namely, delegates of Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Alliance90/Greens (B90), as well as representatives of the Federal Government. Testing hypotheses addressing the form, strategy and scope of climate policy narratives articulated by these three groups, we find some but not all classical expectations of research based on the NPF confirmed: While narratives of the Greens and AfD differ strongly concerning their underlying beliefs and forms of narrative vilification and dramatization, no evidence is found for the assumption that climate-sceptical discourse has a stronger European narrative dimension.