Rising from the Depths: Mapping the Emergence of Coalitions across EU Environmental Policymaking Processes

Coordination between diverse policy actors leads to the emergence of coalitions and helps address complex environmental problems by incorporating varying perspectives and resources, generating policy change. Hence, coalitions can facilitate policy progress by aggregating policy actors’ preferences and simplifying the overall process. This same variance, however, can also spurn conflicts, blocking policy progress. Research on coalitions in EU (environmental) policymaking primarily identifies coalitions, either within EU institutions or in an ad-hoc manner and at a given moment in the policymaking process, to explain policy outcomes and change. Interestingly, these identified coalitions structurally differ along multiple dimensions, for example , by membership, resources, and durability. Yet, no systematic mapping or characterisation has been conducted across policymaking processes to take stock of this variation. As a first step, doing so is necessary to develop explanations for coalitions, which is currently sparse, and deepen our understandings of EU environmental policymaking processes. Consequently, this paper asks: what types of coalitions emerge in EU environmental policymaking processes? Scholars show that different structures of coalitions have varying consequences on the outcome of a policy process. Studying what different coalitions emerge, we can begin to infer whether and when policy progress or conflict may arise and the appetite and extent for policy change. Focusing on five diverse cases (the European Climate Law, the Batteries Regulation, Renewable Energy Directive, Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, and the Just Transition Fund) this paper aims to first, systematically map and identify varying coalitions across the agenda-setting, policy formulation, and decision-making stages, through social network analysis. Then, coalitions will be characterised along a set of dimensions derived from the literature. To do so, semi-structured interviews and public documents, including specialized press reports, EU documents, and position papers are relied on.