Meaningful public participation in EU climate governance: towards robust findings in comparative studies.

While public participation in climate policy holds the promise of enhancing both the legitimacy and quality of policy decisions, realising such promises depends critically on the quality of the implemented participation. Yet existing research assessing participation quality is characterised by substantial variation in analytical choices across frameworks, and by the fact that these choices are rarely made explicit. This lack of transparency is a critical gap in the literature, because it affects the scope and validity of findings, particularly in comparative settings. This article asks which member states are robust high performers in implementing high-quality public participation in the National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs), and to what extent this robustness holds across two key analytical choices. To do so, it develops a robustness testing framework evaluating the stability of country classifications across these two analytical choices, applied to Member States' NECPs across two complete planning cycles (2018–2024). Although findings are forthcoming, by making analytical choices explicit and testing the stability of findings across them, this article aims to produce more dependable evidence on participation quality, therefore enhancing comparability across the literature and the likelihood that findings are meaningfully taken up by practitioners.