Learning to Regulate the EU Green Transition: A Case for Supranational Influence?

Energy and climate policies have been, at least since the late 1980s, an emergent field of European integration. Yet, EU member states have long been reluctant to hand over their national prerogatives, opting instead for loose forms of coordination and soft regulation. No longer an 'engine' of integration, the European Commission has been, for its part, seldom capable to overcome these resistances and push forward the energy and climate agenda, as widely acknowledged in the literature on its lingering decline. Against this backdrop, in the last fifteen years, there have been some major breakthroughs in this field, culminating in the adoption of the European Green Deal (2019) and, more recently, the REPower EU plan (2022). In order to make sense of this recent regulatory élan and of the European Commission's role in it, this paper argues for re-thinking influence on EU policy-making as a problem of ‘who controls what is learnt’ and, hence, which policy-relevant knowledge informs EU policies. It builds on policy learning scholarship to conceptualise the Commission as a sui generis knowledge broker that acts, at the same time, as a 'learner' vis-à-vis its knowledge networks and a 'teacher' when interacting with other EU institutions. Looking at recent developments in this field, the paper aims to explain when and how the Commission manages to push forward climate and energy policies at the EU level, and it makes a case for adopting a learning-informed analytical framework linking knowledge to (supranational) influence.