Climate Policy Integration in the evolving European Green Deal agenda: Tracing dynamics of punctuation and stability

Climate Policy Integration (CPI) is a concept of key relevance for tracing the expansion of climate agendas towards a broader range of policy fields under the European Green Deal (EGD) and its adjustment in response to the Covid pandemic (NGEU) and war in Ukraine (REPEU). Considering the more volatile political environment resulting from these exogenous shocks and political contestation of zero-carbon policies across the EU, the paper inquires how to evaluate dynamics of CPI within these conditions and related turn of EU climate agendas towards a more geopolitical approach: How can a theoretical concept of CPI be devised that evaluates sources of political disruption and conflict as opposed to conditions of policy stability in their role as vectors of policy integration in a setting of shifting and contested boundaries of climate governance? Addressing this question, the paper harnesses extant process-oriented concepts of policy integration that suggest four relevant dimensions of CPI familiar from theories of the policy process: namely, policy framing, subsystems, goals and instruments. In its main part, the paper discusses how dynamics of stability and punctuation can be applied to operationalize these dimensions, theorize their interaction to explain both their imbalances and mutual adjustment, and explain resulting policy change both towards the integration and disintegration of climate targets. The theoretical part is followed by an empirical case study on key events of adjustment of the EGD to exogenous shocks to illustrate the application of the proposed theoretical model. Promoting the understanding of CPI as a set of processes that are both subject of political contestation and instrument for its calibration, the paper contributes to three literatures: those conceptualizing policy integration as a political and often politicized process, discussing policy stability as a factor of climate governance, and evaluating EU climate governance in a context of turbulence.