Abstract
The European Union’s 2030 climate and energy package introduced fundamental changes compared to its 2020 predecessor. These changes included a stronger focus on the internal market and an increased emphasis on technology-neutral decarbonization while simultaneously de-emphasizing the renewables target. This article investigates whether changes in domestic policy strategies of leading member states in European climate policy preceded the observed changes in EU policy. Disaggregating strategic change into changes in different elements (goals, objectives, instrumental logic), allows us to go beyond analyzing the relative prioritization of different goals, and to analyze how policy requirements for reaching those goals were dynamically redefined over time. To this end, we introduce a new method, which based on insights from social network analysis, enables us to systematically trace those strategic chances. We find that shifts in national strategies of the investigated member states preceded the shift in EU policy. In particular, countries reframed their understanding of supply security, and pushed for the internal electricity market also as a security measure to balance fluctuating renewables. Hence, the increasing focus on markets and market integration in the European 2030 package echoed the increasingly central role of the internal market for electricity supply security in national strategies. These findings also highlight that countries dynamically redefined their goals relative to the different phases of the energy transition.
Highlights
In 2019, the European Union passed a series of laws as part of the 2030 climate and energy package, which includes important changes from its 2020 predecessor (EC, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2012)
Our results show that between TP1 and TP2, climate policy-leading countries in the EU increasingly linked “supply security” to “internal market,” but that they did not place these elements more centrally—because “supply security” remained a highly central goal
We find that most states strategically linked “supply security” and “internal market” in TP2, while only the UK and Sweden linked these goals in TP1
Summary
In 2019, the European Union passed a series of laws as part of the 2030 climate and energy package, which includes important changes from its 2020 predecessor (EC, 2009a, 2009b, 2009c, 2012). In addition to a weaker legal status for renewables, the 2030 package focuses on emissions trading as the main instrument for decarbonization instead of support policies for renewables (EC, 2018a; Fitch-Roy et al, 2019). Supporters of technologyneutral decarbonization promoted a single, legally binding greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction target for the entire European Union. This position favored a strong emissions trading scheme and supported reconfiguring the existing system with low- or zero-carbon technologies (e.g., switch from coal to gas or nuclear power) and sequestration technologies (e.g., carbon capture and storage) (Gullberg, 2015; HM Government, 2014). Member states that focused on supporting renewables prevailed in the negotiations, and the 2020 package established binding national renewable energy and climate targets
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