Too flexible or too rigid? Analysis of the implementation of the EU Regulation on faster permitting for renewables

The EU has increasingly resorted to more flexible policy arrangements to achieve political support for advancing a common clean energy and climate policy. An important feature of such flexibility has been to provide room for discretion to member states when implementing certain legal provisions. Despite the large body of research on the implementation and enforcement of EU policy, little attention has been paid so far to how and why are flexible provisions in EU policy implemented differently across member states. Furthermore, the consequences of flexibility in policy implementation for the coherence of common EU policy efforts have remained insufficiently explored. We seek to address this gap by investigating the implementation of the EU Regulation to accelerate the permitting process for renewable energy projects adopted by the Council in December 2022. The Regulation was initially designed to last 18 months and it includes a set of uniform and flexible provisions for member states to streamline the permitting process for renewables. Drawing on interviews and secondary data sources, we investigate the reasons and consequences of the differentiated implementation of the Council Regulation across several member states. Our study yields important insights into the multi-level political context which shapes the transformative potential of flexible EU policy provisions.