The COVID-19 Crisis: Critical Juncture for EU Climate Policy Development

The EU has demonstrated increasing commitment to combating climate change, by adopting ever-more stringent climate mitigation targets and an increasingly expansive set of policies. In December 2019, the European Commission published the European Green Deal (EGD) – an evolving, overarching policy strategy with the goal to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 at its heart. Just as the plans were underway to implement the EGD, the COVID-19 crisis hit. In this article, we ask ‘will the COVID-19 crisis be a critical juncture for EU climate policy, and why?’ Experience from previous economic crises suggests that climate policy may be set aside. In 2020, however, the EU’s crisis response seems rather to have advanced EU climate policy. Given the transformational change already embedded in the EGD, we suggest that the positive effects of the COVID-19 crisis may not add up to a critical juncture, since they reinforce previous changes rather than transform policy development. We reflect on the role of Commission entrepreneurialism and the politicisation of climate change and climate policy to explain this outcome. We conclude by highlighting the importance of the next stages of implementation for both the EGD and the EU’s COVID-19 response.