Policy and political (in)coherence, security, and Nordic-Baltic energy transitions

Global challenges, such as climate change, require increasingly horizontal governance approaches, as solving such challenges is dependent on coordinated policies between the administrative sectors of energy, transport, industrial, environment, finance, innovation, social, education, foreign and security policies. Such coordination is difficult, because administrative sectors have long traditions, their own worldviews, and specific objectives they seek to advance. This paper is focused on the complicatedness of achievement coherence between energy and security policies, in a time when the energy sector is being decarbonized and major geopolitical shifts are taking place partly in connection to the energy transition. Drawing on the literature on policy coherence and integration, the paper analyses in total 60 expert interviews from three Nordic-Baltic European countries: Estonia, Finland and Norway. It pays attention to administrative interaction between energy and security, the presence or absence of strategies, agencies and mechanisms for horizontal coherence, political coherence, and the integration of security into energy policy and vice versa. Based on ongoing analysis, the countries show significant differences and interesting features for policy coherence connected to the European energy transition. For instance, Finland has a long tradition of relatively successful horizontal governance, and it has been used in preparing cross-governmental climate and energy strategies for the past two decades. Yet, the connection between energy and security is not part of this regular horizontal exchange, and some argue that energy has in effect been desecuritised and apoliticised (political incoherence), partly due to Finland’s history and economic relations with Russia. Yet, simultaneously, also successful measures for policy coherence exist, such as the National Security Council including energy questions, public-private ‘Power Pools’ preparing regularly for crisis situations, and cyber security work and critical materials assessments by the National Emergency Supply Agency. Yet, these efforts look at energy and security always from the perspective of one of the domains and not holistically, and common strategy or vision for security and the energy transition is missing. Instead, Estonia is largely relying on informal structures for policy coherence. Mechanisms for coherence are created as bottom-up problem-solving mechanisms instead of setting such mechanisms from the start to increase synergies and prevent conflicts. Energy, security, foreign affairs and defence actors share common perspectives on the synergies between the advancing energy transition and security. The clearest conflict is between expanding off-shore wind energy and interference of military radars, and another well acknowledged between the dependency of the Ida-Virumaa region on oil shale. Despite an open acknowledgement of the importance of national security in the energy transition, transitions may not be advanced rapidly and transparently enough when reliant on informal interaction alone. The final paper will also include an analysis of Norwegian policy and politics at the interface of security and energy, and an overall discussion.