A Gradual Geoeconomic Awakening: Explaining Incremental Change in the European Union’s Critical Raw Material Act
(2026) (7.September.2026)
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- Abstract
- The 2022 energy crisis was a particularly severe situation for European Union leaders, which opened a window of opportunity for policymaking in the field of critical raw materials. A greatly threatening, urgent and uncertain situation, the crisis revealed critical weaknesses in the Union’s supply chains and consecrated a geoeconomic turn that started to take pace during the COVID pandemic. With the momentum of the crisis, the critical raw material act could have brought a major policy change for the critical raw material sector, fully and immediately implementing this geoeconomic turn and its prescribed instruments: subsidies, central planification, trade and investment tools. Yet the EU instead took a gradual, layering approach with the CRMA setting aspirational benchmarks, nudging and monitoring instruments. It is only a year after its adoption that those geoeconomic instruments were proposed under the RESourceEU plan. This raises the question of why the 2022 energy crisis’ momentum yielded only incremental, gradual change in the EU’s critical raw material policy: Why then, did the 2022 energy crisis window of opportunity only enabled incremental changes with the CRMA? This piece’ central argument is that crises constitute both a context providing political momentum and triggers for policymaking. The way these momentum and trigger are used then depends on the political agenda and motivation of policy entrepreneur and political leaders: it can be to push for more change, or to adopt an incremental change in just under 6 months of negotiations, as was the case with the CRMA. This piece analyzes the CRMA’s policymaking process using the Multiple Streams Framework. Using theory-testing process tracing, this research leverages 22 interviews with institutional actors and stakeholders involved in the CRMA policymaking process, as well as reports from specialist news agencies Agence Europe and Context. This research refines the MSF and contributes to the crisis policymaking literature through the identification of the mechanism underpinning an incremental change outcome and a severe-crisis related trigger.
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Besnier, T. (2026, September 8). A Gradual Geoeconomic Awakening: Explaining Incremental Change in the European Union’s Critical Raw Material Act. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/281573