The European Commission’s consultation regime - consultative contraction and detraction

The European Commission engages with a multitude of stakeholders in order to consult with its task environment. When formulating policies, the Commission relies on policy expertise from various stakeholders while stakeholders depend on the Commission for access to the policy-making process. This paper showcases how the formal structure of both the Commission and stakeholders affect the Commission administration’s consultation behaviour, ultimately resulting in different consultation patterns conceptualized as consultative contraction and consultative detraction. Consultative contraction denotes a standardized and top-down coordinated approach towards the stakeholders with a bias towards few, large and old stakeholder groups. Consultative detraction reflects a fairly fragmented approach towards the stakeholders where many, small and new stakeholder groups are included in the policy-making process. In other words, it implies a shift of actors being involved in the consultation process. Hence, we ask: To what extent did the process of formulating the battery regulation display consultative contraction and/or consultative detraction? More specifically, this is a study of how Commission officials involved stakeholders when formulating their battery regulation proposal published on 10 December 2020. The proposal contains elements of both old and new provisions being merged into a single legal instrument where two Directorate-Generals (DGs), DG Environment (ENV) and DG Growth (Grow), shared the responsibility of formulating the proposal encompassing the entire battery value chain. We find that elements of consultative contraction and detraction co-existed and co-evolved. The article offers two contributions. First, the article contributes theoretically to the organizational theory agenda by shedding light on how the organizational capacity of the Commission and stakeholders as well as the temporality of the consultation process shape patterns of consultative contraction and detraction. Second, benefiting from 17 semi-structured interviews, the article proposes how patterns of consultative contraction and detraction co-existed during the process of formulating the Commission’s battery regulation proposal.