Know, how? Reassessing influence in EU energy efficiency policy-making through the lens of learning

This paper makes the case for a systematic integration of the dimensions of ‘powering’ and ‘puzzling’ in the study of EU policy-making. As EU competences widen and policy problems grow more complex, policy-making takes place in conditions of little agreement on norms and values and high uncertainty about available and usable knowledge. Building on these premises, the paper attempts to re-conceptualise EU policy-making, and the role of the European Commission therein, from a learning-informed perspective. The paper assumes learning as an ontology of policy-making, shifting the analytical focus from studying the conditions for learning to understanding the causal mechanisms that link knowledge to influence, thus reconciling puzzling and powering. The paper argues for conceptualising the role of the Commission as that of a sui generis knowledge broker that mediates between knowledge networks – the ‘world of policy solutions’ – and formal decision-makers, while being a producer and user of knowledge itself. It then focuses on EU energy efficiency policy-making as a crucial test case for assessing these learning dynamics. Energy efficiency is acknowledged to be a hard-to-measure and ontologically ambiguous concept, and its benefits are difficult to demonstrate in empirical terms, given the complexity of the social-ecological systems in which it is implemented. Furthermore, energy efficiency policies raise multiple distributive conflicts, both in terms of member states’ prerogatives and economic and social costs. Through adopting a process-tracing approach the paper analyses EU energy efficiency policy-making, to capture the Commission’s influence on climate and energy governance as a matter of control over knowledge-making and learning processes.