Re-Packing in Times of Crises and Conflict: The Making of the Clean Energy Package

At the very end of 2018, the EU reached a political agreement on the Clean Energy Package for 2030. The package apparently represented further coordination and integration of EU policies for an energy transition and for the internal energy market. The stated purpose was to align markets to renewables and renewables to markets through an interconnected set of new and reformed climate and energy policies. The package was made in the context of a crisis-ridden political landscape in Europe with a strengthening of nationalist sentiments, increasing economic cleavages and contested migration policies failing to distribute equitably responsibilities and burdens among the member states; manifested by Brexit. While growing conflict puts strain on negotiations toward further integration, issue linkages by coupling and decoupling policies in packages may broaden (or narrow) the space in which a political deal can be brokered (Sebenius 1983). Indeed, the EU has moved towards bundling climate and energy policies in packages in tandem with its geographical expansion. How have issue linkages and the contestation of ‘an ever closer Union’ affected the design of the Clean Energy Package? This paper examines the impact of issue linkage in climate and energy policymaking in a context of EU contestation. Specifically, we analyze the role of issue linkage and an EU-skeptic context to explain the Clean Energy Package design. Data come from multiple sources, including public records and semi-structured interviews with representatives from member states, EU institutions and interest groups. The Clean Energy Package offers an example of how EU governance develops in a context of resistance and political contestation, and under what conditions issue linkage can counterbalance conflict and diverging interests. We expect that the Clean Energy Package reflects ‘old’ supranationalism, propelled by autonomous supranational institutions and transnational actors, to the extent issue linking has progressed outcomes beyond the preferences of the least enthusiastic member states such as Poland. Here, the a package will include delegation to, and institution-building at, the EU level (Stone Sweet and Sandholtz 1998). Alternatively, we expect the Package to reflect ‘new’ intergovernmentalism, propelled by increasingly enthusiastic member states, to the extent outcomes still reflect the least ambitious member states (Bickerton et al, 2015). Positive policy feedback from implementing EU 2020 policies toward 2020 may have raised ambitions among the ‘least ambitious’. Here, the package will reflect intergovernmental coordination without supranational delegation (Bickerton et al 2015), and national sovereignty will be safeguarded via flexibility and derogations in adopted legislation.