Abstract
ABSTRACT In the emerging debate on ‘harder soft governance,’ the relationship between hard and soft elements has not been fully explored. This paper addresses this gap by looking at the changing nature of policy monitoring, a quintessentially soft governance mechanism. It focuses on climate change, a dynamic site of policy expansion and experimentation in which the EU has historically been an international frontrunner. This paper finds that a range of ‘harder’ elements have been added to the EU's climate policy monitoring over time, including more explicit legal provisions, greater external publicity, and more concrete links to other policy processes. These changes have emerged from politically sensitive negotiations between many actors, principally the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Environment Agency (who together have generally favoured greater hardening), and Member States (some of whom preferred softer governance) in the context of changing international opportunities and constraints. Moving forward, this paper highlights the need for more research on the efficacy of policy monitoring, especially with respect to the EU's significantly more ambitious long-term decarbonisation targets.
Highlights
Debates on soft governance are by no means new, in the context of the European Union (EU). Brandsen et al (2006, p. 546) define soft governance as a form of steering where: central government directs local authorities and agencies, not by hierarchically imposing what should be done but by providing unofficial guidelines on how to improve the quality of local practice
While a move towards harder soft governance (HSG) is apparent in many policy fields, these dynamics had so far been unexplored in the area of climate policy and especially with respect to the governance tool of policy monitoring
We found that efforts to increase the impact of climate policy monitoring through hardening it have been underway in recent years
Summary
Debates on soft governance are by no means new, in the context of the European Union (EU) (see Graziano & Halpern, 2016). Brandsen et al (2006, p. 546) define soft governance as a form of steering where: central government directs local authorities and agencies, not by hierarchically imposing what should be done but by providing unofficial guidelines on how to improve the quality of local practice. Aldy, 2018; European Environment Agency, 2016; Fransen & Cronin, 2013; Schoenefeld et al, 2018), the hardening elements remain by and large unknown. This state of affairs is surprising because, as Schoenefeld and Rayner (2019) highlight, ‘[n]ever has policy monitoring been as extensive, complex and at times politicised as today’
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