Defining the green to make environmental concerns heard in the EU? The legal consequences of the (unexpected) uses of the taxonomy

Vander Putten, Norman
(2025) Standing Up for the Voiceless. Exploring the EU’s Capacity for Rights Protection — ISBN: [978-2-8028-0538-0], p. 23-46, published

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The European Union (EU) has recently adopted different legislative acts that classify economic activities as being environmentally sustainable or not. Implicitly, they aim at visibilizing elements that are deeply linked to intergenerational justice and future generations’ interests. They may contribute not only to relevant environmental policy-making, but also to unmute NGOs or interested citizens, as those actors may rely on environmental categories to hold public authorities or private companies to account in political and judicial arenas in a seemingly objective manner. A prominent example of such acts is Regulation 2020/852 establishing a taxonomy for sustainable investments. While the taxonomy has been understood as a market tool that would help ensuring that financial actors have trustworthy information, this chapter highlights that it serves to frame not only private actors’ decisions, but also, less expectedly, public authority’s rising (environmental) governance through spending, which increasingly dwells on the European taxonomy to allow future generations’ interests to be (allegedly) considered. This has a decisive impact on both the legitimacy and legal validity of using delegated acts to define the content of the taxonomy, considering that delegations must, under EU law, only cover non essential aspects of an area. This chapter therefore argues that efforts to amplify future generations’ interests through taxonomies are, to some extent, being pursued at the cost of the greater democratic legitimacy that should have accompanied regulation through standard legislative acts.
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Vander Putten, N. (2025). Defining the green to make environmental concerns heard in the EU? The legal consequences of the (unexpected) uses of the taxonomy. In Denis Duez et Cecilia Rizcallah (ed.), Standing Up for the Voiceless. Exploring the EU’s Capacity for Rights Protection (p. p. 23-46). Presses universitaires Saint-Louis.