The challenge of ratcheting up climate ambitions under the Paris Agreement: the case of EU Energy & climate governance

The 2015 Paris Agreement established a bottom-up pledge and review process of national climate targets and actions, defined through regularly updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC). Similarly, the EU’s 2018 Regulation on the Governance of the Energy Union and Climate Action creates a process by which member states submit their National Energy & Climate Plans (NECP), which are then reviewed by the European Commission. Here we explore the inter-institutional relationship between the Commission and member states, and the extent to which this ostensibly collaborative process of increasing the ambition and implementation of climate policy is depoliticised or instead contested. The paper also asks whether this experimentalist governance framework has delivered on its ambitions of combining national flexibility, an embedded intergovernmentalism, with effectiveness in delivering the EU’s increasing collective energy and climate commitments. To assess the governance framework’s ability to close the gap between rising ambitions and implementation, the paper tracks the process of drafting and updating of NECPs – including interactions with the Commission and public consultations – in several ‘leader’ and ‘laggard’ countries, based on documentary analysis and expert interviews. We draw implications from the EU’s experience for the global stocktake exercise under the Paris Agreement and reforms from the Glasgow COP26.