Abstract
As part of the EU Green Deal initiative in 2019, the EU Commission decided to develop a proposal to include emissions from shipping in the EU emissions trading system. This occurred only one year after the Commission had heralded the emissions reduction agreement negotiated in the International Maritime Organization (IMO) as a significant step forward—thereby signalling support for the IMO process. We apply a multi-level reinforcement perspective to explain this apparent policy volte-face, resulting in a Commission proposal in July 2021 which is now moving through institutions in the EU. Such a perspective notes the “friendly” competition for leadership among central actors at various levels in the EU—particularly the Commission, the European Parliament, and leading member states. We find, first, that the inclusion of shipping is in line with the broadening ambitions of the Commission since the start of the emissions trading system. Second, until 2019, the Parliament carried the regulatory torch. A turning point in the policymaking process was the inclusion of the shipping issue in Ursula von der Leyen’s programme for getting accepted by the Parliament and elected as Commission leader in 2019. From then on, the Commission again took the lead. Third, despite the 2018 IMO agreement, progress there was deemed slow, which further motivated EU policymakers to act unilaterally.
Highlights
The EU emissions trading system (ETS) initially tar‐ geted the power sector and energy‐intensive indus‐ tries, with the declared ambition of cover‐ ing more sectors and emissions over time
The essence of the multi‐level reinforcement (MLR) perspective, as presented by Schreurs and Tiberghien (2007), is that EU leadership in climate change can be seen as the result of a dynamic process of multi‐level competition for leadership and reinforcement among dif‐ ferent EU political poles within a context of decentralized governance: the actions and commitments of a group of pioneering states and the leadership roles played by the Parliament and the Commission
An MLR perspective can help in explaining the drive to include shipping in the ETS
Summary
The EU emissions trading system (ETS) initially tar‐ geted the power sector and energy‐intensive indus‐ tries, with the declared ambition of cover‐ ing more sectors and emissions over time. No more than a year after the IMO agree‐ ment, the Commission announced a new drive to include shipping emissions in the ETS—a drive which seems to have been little affected by the Covid‐19 pandemic and the related reduction in transport activities. Politics and Governance, 2022, Volume 10, Issue 1, Pages 246–255 culminated with a formal proposal to extend the EU ETS to certain shipping emissions by the Commission in July 2021, as part of the “Fit for 55” package of measures This package is moving through the EU institutions in a process likely to take several years to complete. The ship‐ ping process reveals the increasingly important role played by the Parliament in the multi‐level reinforce‐ ment dynamic, and the importance of giving more weight to interaction with the EU‐external environment in this dynamic
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