Greening the European Semester: scope, direction and policy implications

The European Semester (ES) has progressively consolidated and expanded its original mandate, evolving from a framework for coordinating fiscal policies to one that increasingly shapes social policy developments at the national level. More recently, the European Commission has proactively broadened the ES’s scope to further incorporate environmental objectives. Yet, existing research has not systematically examined how the ES engages with environmental concerns, including those linked to the decarbonization agenda. To fill this gap, we apply the concepts of policy density and policy intensity (Shaub et al., 2022; Schaffrin et al., 2015) to assess the extent to which the ES has integrated green goals—both in terms of the amount of environmental oriented provisions and their comprehensiveness in terms of resources they mobilize (i.e. regulatory, financial, information, etc.). We analyze the number and characteristics of the 607 environment-related Country-Specific Recommendations (CSRs) issued between 2011 and 2025 as indicators of the EU’s ambition to “green” its macroeconomic governance. Preliminary findings suggest three main insights. First, the greening of the ES does not appear to operate as an alternative enforcement mechanism capable of addressing the substantial implementation deficits that persist in EU environmental legislation. Second, the Commission’s political commitment to the climate and decarbonization agenda is associated with an increase in green CSRs. Third, the eco-density of the ES is higher in policy subfields covered by the Macroeconomic Imbalance Procedure and the post-pandemic recovery instruments.