Navigating the Ecological Transition: An Analysis of Experimentalist Governance through National Action Plans and their Variation across Member States

With the European Green Deal (EGD), the European Union has set itself ambitious goals in environmental and climate policy. In particular, the overarching objective of achieving climate neutrality requires substantial, cross-sectoral transformations. Diverse national contexts, priorities, and interest constellations complicate the task of finding common ground and advancing unified efforts in climate action. In response to these challenges, the EU has embraced experimentalist governance (XG) approaches in recent years. This involves establishing common goals, metrics, and structures while devolving the responsibility to member states to define specific actions and measures at the national and lower levels. Proponents of experimentalism highlight its potential for regulation under complexity, uncertainty and differential national contexts (i.a. Sabel and Zeitlin 2008; Rangoni and Zeitlin 2020), which makes it particularly suitable for steering and regulating a cross-sectoral ecological transition in a multilevel system like the EU. Furthermore, in leaving room for diverse national contexts and interests, experimentalism proactively addresses member states’ customization tendencies (Brendler and Thomann 2023; Zhelyazkova and Thomann 2021). However, there is limited research on how XG functions in practice (Monti and Rangoni 2022), particularly on how it is realised across different policy sectors (Mathieu/Rangoni 2019). This paper addresses this research gap by comparing XG arrangements in three policy areas in the context of Europe’s ecological transition. Focussing on the instrument of national action plans, we first analyse whether and how European XG arrangements differ between energy policy (National Energy and Climate Plans), agricultural policy (National CAP Strategic Plans) and resource policy (National Circular Economy Action Plans). Second, we turn to the national level. Our central research interest is whether XG arrangements at the EU level actually lead to experimentation at the national level, defined as a high degree of variation between member states’ national action plans, or whether we find convergence instead. We compare all national action plans (n=81) along a horizontal dimension (scope) and a vertical dimension (specificity), using quantitative and qualitative text analysis. The horizontal dimension of scope relates to how a member state frames and contextualises policy action in the respective area, specifically to the amount of different themes and topics that are referred to. The vertical dimension of specificity relates to whether member states define specific objectives, metrics or obligations in their action plans or remain more ambiguous and general. In analysing the variation across national action plans, we gain valuable insights into how member states navigate experimentalist governance arrangements. This, in turn, allows for a more nuanced understanding of European ecological transition governance and the functioning of different governance approaches and instruments in practice.