The Concept of Policy Surveillance in European Energy and Climate Governance

Much of modern-day climate and energy governance in Europe and beyond increasingly relies on little studied processes that have variously been described as monitoring, reporting and aspects of policy evaluation. Drawing on Aldy (2014, 2018), this paper proposes ‘policy surveillance’ as an overarching concept that encompasses processes of monitoring, reporting and evaluating. The aim of this paper is to critically engage with this new concept, relate it to discussions on monitoring, reporting and evaluating, and then discuss these insights in the context of emerging climate and energy governance through the proposed Energy Union in Europe. The discussion includes both theoretical aspects in order to carefully unpack the various (and often highly normative) assumptions embedded in policy surveillance (such as the efficacy of transparency and ideas on learning), as well as emerging empirical evidence on what we know about who demands policy surveillance, why and which actors engage in policy surveillance, how they do so, and with what (empirically demonstrable) effects in the real world. This discussion reveals the close entanglement between technical questions (such as greenhouse gas monitoring) and the corresponding political and administrative actors and institutions in place in order to conduct and order policy surveillance. Doing so allows, in the final section, to assess the emerging Energy Union governance against both theoretical and existing empirical findings in order to understand the set-up of the Energy Union and make an early assessment of its potential for successfully navigating today’s pressing policy issues in the area of climate change and energy governance through policy surveillance.