Rising from the Depths: Mapping the Emergence of Coalitions across the European Green Deal
(2024) University Association of Contemporary European Studies Annual Conference 2024 — Location: Trento, Italy (1.September.2024)
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- Abstract
- The European Green Deal proposes a systemic approach to a whole of society and just transition to reach climate neutrality by 2050. Such transition brings into the fore diverse policy actors who coordinate and compete to achieve their preferences, promoting or hindering the transition. Coordination between diverse policy actors that share preferences can lead to the emergence of coalitions. Research on coalitions in EU environmental policymaking primarily identifies varying coalitions to explain policy outcomes and change. Yet, no systematic mapping or comparative characterization of coalitions has been conducted across EU environmental policymaking processes to account for this variation. Consequently, this paper asks: what types of coalitions emerge in EU environmental policymaking processes within the European Green Deal? EU environmental coalitions are mapped, identified, and characterised in three steps, relying on press reports, EU official documents, interviews, and websites. Focusing on five diverse cases (the European Climate Law, the Batteries Regulation, Renewable Energy Directive, Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, and the Just Transition Fund), social network analysis is first conducted on coordination networks of each of the legislative proposals to identify clusters of policy actors. Second, content analysis is used to examine the preferences of policy actors within the identified clusters to determine the preference similarity of each cluster, resulting in the identification of coalitions. Third, the identified coalitions are measured and characterized along five structural dimensions, resulting in a coalition typology. The aim of the typology is to enhance descriptions of identified coalitions and offer relative characterisations to enable systematic comparative analysis of coalitions and examine the relations between the different coalition dimensions. 32 coalitions are identified across the European Climate Law, the CBAM, and the Sustainable Batteries regulation, and 17 overarching coalition types are found to emerge, which vary across and within policymaking processes. Four coalition types, 24, 16, 13, and 28, have been highlighted as the most frequently emerging. Uncovering the types of coalitions that emerge in EU Environmental policymaking is important as literature show that different structures of coalitions have varying consequences on the outcome of a policy process. By taking stock of what different coalition types emerge, we can begin to infer whether and when policy progress or conflict may arise and the appetite and extent for policy change, in turn deepen our understanding of EU environmental policymaking.
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Crellin, C. (2024). Rising from the Depths: Mapping the Emergence of Coalitions across the European Green Deal. University Association of Contemporary European Studies Annual Conference 2024, Trento, Italy. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/269551