Climate governance as complex path dependent processes: Insights from three decades of research on the EU

EU has longer experience with climate governance than any other polity. Since the 1990s, the volume and strength of EU climate governance have grown into a complex portfolio of policies and practices, which is facilitated by political-administrative structures both at the EU-level and within member states. More recently, most countries have developed a climate governance, but no other political units have such a long and encompassing climate governance experience as the EU. In this review piece, we assess the lessons learned about the drivers and obstacles to climate governance in the EU. We show that a broad variety of explanatory frameworks have been applied to facilitate EU climate governance assessment, and that path-dependency framework have become prevalent. We zoom in on what we have learned when it comes to the role of differing types of policy feedbacks and critical junctures. This review is especially focused on detecting governance driving mechanisms that may be relevant for political units that are now in their initial phases of developing climate governance, such as the USA, but also countries in the Global South. We examine lessons learned with respect to 1) general climate policies, such as carbon pricing and procedural rules, 2) sectoral climate policies, with a specific focus on energy, transport, and agriculture and 3) the machinery of government, relating to administrative structures and decision-making procedures. We draw conclusions when it comes to what insights the large volume of EU climate governance research can give to the general literature on domestic climate governance, and come up with some suggestions for hypotheses that should be tested through systematic comparative studies of the EU and other political units. We are acutely aware of the limits to generalizations from EU studies, but still argue that EU climate governance studies still can yield valuable general insights.