Knowledge Non-Utilization and the Politics of Commission’s Expert Groups: The Case of EU Taxonomy for Sustainable Activities

The basic aim of the proposed study is to demonstrate how the fragmentation of the expert field could be instrumentalized in the political contestation of decarbonization pathways. The main research question of this paper is why the impact of the advice of the Commission’s expert groups (Technical Expert Group on Sustainable Finance-TEG and its successor EU Platform of Sustainable Finance) on the preparation of the Commission’s policy proposals on EU Taxonomy for Sustainable Activities was steadily marginalized in 2019-2022 concerning exclusion of natural gas and nuclear energy projects? Two issues are in focus of empirical interest: ▪️ elaboration of screening criteria defining emissions threshold for gas-fired power plants; ▪️ correspondence of nuclear waste utilization problem with the "to do no harm" Taxonomy principle. On the higher level of abstraction, the question of the paper's concern is why the European Commission does not follow the policy recommendations of expert groups that were set up specifically to provide advice for the elaboration of particular decisions. To answer this question, this study will provide the theorization of the so-called "causal mechanism of political adjustment of expertise supply". Process tracing (Beach and Pedersen 2019) and interviewing will be the core methods of this paper’s research design. Causal mechanisms will be theorized based on a general overview of the Taxonomy adoption process based on media reports and open-source documents and insights from existing literature concerning: ▪️ the general theory of knowledge utilization (Weiss 1979, Radaelli 1995, Boswell 2008, Schrefler 2010); ▪️ the role of Commissions expert groups in the policy process (Larsson and Murk 2007, Gornitzka and Sverdrup 2008, 2011, Chalmers 2014, Dreher 2014, Metz 2015, Krick and Gornitzka 2020); ▪️ the interrelation between core EU institutions in different stages of EU decision-making (Bickerton et al 2015, Becker et al 2016, Smeets and Beach 2020, 2022). Then the study will focus on finding empirical fingerprints of causal mechanisms in the analyzed case based on the results of interviewing participants of analyzed events to prove that all parts of the theorized mechanism took place in the described case.