Governing through turbulence on climate change in the Council and the European Council.

The European Green Deal is a forward-looking action plan which mandates climate neutrality in the EU by 2050 and major systems changes within Europe’s economy in domains spanning energy, agriculture, and transport. In this paper, we examine the roles of the European Council and the Council of Ministers in developing such an ambitious green agenda. We begin with a literature review on the roles of the Council and European Council in EU policy and decision making and how they have been exercised in regards to climate policymaking over time. This includes situating our study within recent re-evaluations of intergovernmental theory including the new intergovernmentalism, deliberative intergovernmentalism, and the intergovernmental union. We then conduct a qualitative content analysis of all Council and European Council Conclusions from 2018 until November 2020 in order to understand how the institutions have engaged with climate policymaking immediately before and after the Euro-pean Commission’s December 2019 proposal for the European Green Deal. We argue that the European Council and the Council of Ministers had a leading role in constructing a recovery plan that prioritised climate neutrality, albeit in different ways. The European Council used its role of “setting the political direction” of the EU to frame an agenda which consistently featured climate change as a priority item. The Council, on the other hand, worked through its “policy coordination” function to integrate climate policy into a diverse array of fields. This paper thus provides a new research agenda for intergovernmental policymaking as it pertains to Europe’s green transition.