The development of European energy policy requires greater institutional and policy coherence. The cross-sectoral nature of this policy necessitates a thorough coordination throughout various policy areas such as environment, foreign affairs, trade, development, enlargement, competition and research. As energy policy-making becomes more interlinked and specialized, achieving policy coherence confronts the European Parliament with the greater challenge of political and administrative coordination. For instance, the standing Committee on Industry, Research and Energy (ITRE) has faced the substantial increase of 'coordination discourse' with associated Committees during the recent years. Foreign Affairs Committee (AFET) is unusually often caught up in 'turf wars' competing for competence over the external energy policy dossiers with the ITRE Committee. The proposed paper will address the problem of energy policy coordination within the European Parliament. While doing so the paper aims to contribute to the academic debate in tree dimensions: theoretical, methodological and empirical. Firstly, it will expose the limits of new institutionalism. Approaching the research problem by means of institutional theory has a number of theoretical difficulties. The most important of them is that new institutionalism (RI, SI, HI) is not sufficiently equipped to examine the problem of institutional coherence. In short, the gap which has been revealed is that actor-based explanations of coordination are largely missing. Later on, the paper will discuss how discursive institutionalism can be better equipped to study the intra-institutional coordination. In particular, it will argue for a greater attention to the role of “communication logic” (Schmidt 2008) - a combination of ideational and discursive abilities in institutional context. Secondly, it will consider the particular methodological difficulties related to discourse analysis. Finally, it will present rich empirical examination of the interaction between different administrative units within the Parliament. The case study will focus on coordination process between committees involved in energy policy making.
