Governance for a decarbonized future - the EU Strategic Energy Technology Plan

Transforming energy systems to counter climate change is a daunting governance task. The European Union took a global lead in 2007 and 2008 when adopting targets and policies for a first-step transition towards 2020. In 2014, the EU state leaders agreed on next-step transition targets towards 2030. The 2008 EU energy and climate package combined energy demand-oriented policies with a new technology push-focused policy pillar to speed up the commercialization of new low-carbon energy technologies, the Strategic Energy Technology Plan (SET-Plan). Scaling up the funding of Research and Innovation (R&I) in such technologies at all levels (EU, member state and industry) was an important objective of the SET-plan together with making better use of the available scarce resources through the co-ordination of R&I programming. The SET-plan represented a first-of-a-kind effort to strategically govern the programming of sector research and innovation at the EU-level. The Plan, as a new EU policy field, has not been given much attention in research and any critical evaluation of implementation has not been carried out. This article aims to fill this gap. The focus on EU governance in the field is timely given the current EU discussion on what governance model should be established for reaching the newly adopted energy and climate targets set for 2030. A multi-level governance system was set up under the SET-Plan with shared responsibility for implementation by all main R&I-actors: the member state governments, industries and national R&D institutions, with the European Commission taking the position as lead day-to-day co-ordinator. This system reflected that the traditional community method of EU policy making would not be applicable for the policy fields in question, R&I and energy policies, where the competences of EU institutions were limited. The article addresses implementation of the SET-plan and explains how the adopted governance model has worked to achieve the goals and objectives set for the plan. Preliminary observations indicate that actual implementation outcomes by 2015 have not lived up to the objectives. Total EU funding of energy R&I, while increasing in the period, remained far from sufficient to deliver on the ambitions set out in detailed technology roadmaps adopted to produce large-scale demonstration projects. Joint Programming initiatives between research institutions were more virtual than representing real coordination of research efforts. Responding to the challenges, the Commission in 2013 proposed substantial changes to the SET-plan framework: the technology priorities and the governance system. To explain the performance of the SET-Plan, we apply a Multilevel Governance approach combined with the new governance literature. We ask: what characterized the initial governance system set up for the SET-Plan, how and why did this fail, with what consequences for the revised governance system now under development? Data is collected from public documents and a series of 25 interviews with European Commission Staff, national government representatives, and other SET-plan stakeholders.