From the European Green Deal to the Clean Industrial Deal: Tracing Change in the EU’s Framing of the Climate-Energy nexus

Since its launch in 2019, the European Green Deal (EGD) as the main template for EU climate action has gone through several stages of adjustment. A key aspect of change is the shift towards a more geopolitical and externally oriented focus of policy priorities and actions, driven in part by concerns about questions of energy security but also integrating the EU climate agenda with issues of trade and investment, technological competitiveness and supply of critical raw materials. Epitomized by the adoption of a Clean Industrial Deal as the successor agenda of the EGD, a question of key importance is how this shift in the framing of EU climate action affects the nexus between energy and biodiversity. Are questions of nature protection repressed in favor of a new emphasis on supply of materials, open markets and energy security? Addressing this question, the paper traces the evolution of policy frames proposed by EU policy-makers for the climate-energy nexus, considering its linkages with and weighing of the competing priorities of industrial policy and biodiversity protection. Applying a mixed-method approach, the paper first uses text-as-data tools to model the evolution of relevant policy frames in conclusions of the European Council, key policy documents of the Commission, and relevant resolutions of the European Parliament. In a second step, the analysis zooms in to a qualitative review of discursive linkages proposed in the policy discourse of the Commission, and what shifts of causalities to link priorities of climate and energy policy are observable at this level. In conclusion, the paper finds a significant shift in the framing of EU climate action, both concerning the weighting and proposed causalities of its nexus to priorities of industrial policy and biodiversity.