The European Green Deal and democracy: Conceptual and empirical perspectives

Abstract

The European Union’s European Green Deal (EGD) is an ambitious endeavor seeking to address the urgent need to combat climate change, biodiversity loss and the range of problems flowing from these. Importantly, it expresses the desire to tackle these challenges in a democratic way. Launched by the European Commission in 2019, the EGD has garnered significant public attention and mobilization, not least about how it will reach its goals. The scale of the changes required mean that without democratic consent the green transition is likely to fail, with disastrous consequences. The central aim of this proposed panel is to open up a critical examination of the complex relationship between democracy and the EGD. Current academic literature on the EGD has focused for the most part on its scope, the adoption of specific packages and pieces of legislation, implications for particular sectors and technologies, and reflections on implementation (Giuli and Oberthür 2023). Research to date on questions of democracy and the EGD has been limited. What discussion there has been has concerned the broad political narrative of the EGD (Samper, Schockling and Islar 2021), and the burgeoning body of work looking at the idea of just transition, for the most part in terms of financial, economic, and legal implications (e.g. Sikora 2021). A further trend in the emerging literature has been discussion of the role of citizens in the EGD - through green citizenship or through their direct participation in various forums (Machin and Tan 2022; Torney 2021). At the same time, claims from different actors about the content and decision-making processes around the climate and biodiversity crises are clear. Yet threats are also clear and present: climate change skeptics’ claims and actions, which may hinder the EGD, are on the rise in Europe. Actors on the populist radical right wing have begun to backtrack on environmental policy agendas (Buzogány and Mohamad-Klotzbach 2022). Affected workers and sectors have also begun to challenge aspects of the EGD. Against this backdrop, the proposed panel consists of a set of papers that reflect upon conceptual and empirical dimensions of the relationship between the EGD and democracy. Conceptual papers focus on the dimensions of the climate challenge and its contestation in democracies, and the EGD and the democratic imagination. Empirical papers range across governance levels, focusing on inter-institutional negotiations at EU level in the context of agreement on the European Climate Law and Fit for 55 Package, the role of expert advisory bodies with a focus on Sweden’s Climate Policy Council, and the potential of democratic innovations to transform democracy, with a focus on Ireland’s Children and Young People’s Assembly on Biodiversity Loss. The papers included are a subset of a set of papers that will form part of a forthcoming special issue of Journal of European Integration, along with one paper from a new Horizon Europe project RETOOL: Strengthening Democratic Governance for Climate Transitions.

Title	Details
EU climate policy coordination meets national fragmentation: The case of Norway	View Paper Details
The climate challenge and its contestation in democracies: Advancing the conceptual frontiers	View Paper Details
Coming to Agreement on Climate Neutrality: Council Negotiations Towards the European Climate Law and Fit for 55 Package	View Paper Details
The European Green Deal and the Democratic Imagination	View Paper Details
Climate policy councils: Institutions for overcoming carbon lock-ins and achieving long term goals of net-zero emissions? The case of Sweden’s Climate Policy Council 2018-2023	View Paper Details