The European Commission: A Green Voice within the EU?

While, in general, the Commission is regarded as a proactive actor in the field of environmental policy, its leadership is constrained inter alia by its organisational fragmentation on environmental policy making and its limited capacities to monitor implementation. Recent administrative reforms aimed at improving the internal coordination. Under Barroso the Secretariat General has been transformed into a more interventionist actor with an enhanced role in coordinating and steering the services in the policy formulation process. The new Commission President Juncker has introduced a vice-president system in which the vice presidents steer thematically organsised projects teams. Reacting to the implementation problem, the Commission has focused on streamlining existing planning and reporting mechanisms for the member states. This paper analysis the impact of these changes on the Commission’s role in pushing forward the EU’s Energy Union Project, which aims at ensuring secure, sustainable and competitive energy. It builds on the author’s previous work on the Commission’s internal position finding process regarding the CO2 reduction and renewable energy targets for the time period until 2030 (published in Journal of European Public Policy 22(5), 2015: ‘National binding renewable energy targets for 2020, but not for 2030 anymore: why the European Commission developed from a supporter to a brakeman’) . Following questions are examined: Has the introduction of vice-presidents contributed to more coherence in the preparation of policy proposals? Are the plans for an integrated governance and monitoring process for the Energy Union suitable for enforcing the achievment of the 27% renewable energy target until 2030? Which impact have context factors, such as the heterogenity of member states interests, the tense budget situation of many member states or the rise of Eurosceptisicm on the the Commission’s internal dynamics? To this end, a series of interviews with officials from the European Commission is currently conducted.