European Interest Representation in the Current Era of Uncertainty: The Case of Hydrogen and the Emergence of a New Governance Model

The European Union has long positioned itself as a global leader in climate change mitigation and has made the ecological transformation a cornerstone of its policy agenda. However, in the current era of uncertainty with geopolitical conflicts and economic nationalism challenging the liberal international order, security and competitiveness are increasingly taking precedence over sustainability goals. From the European Green Deal (2019) and RePowerEU (2022) to the Clean Industrial Deal (2025), the European Commission seeks to stronger align decarbonization with industrial and technological competitiveness vis-à-vis China and the United States. This strategic shift reshapes the EU’s policy priorities and modes of governance, creating new challenges and regulatory demands for the system of interest intermediation. As previous research has shown, the Commission relies heavily on private actors, whose expertise is crucial for policy design and whose participation enhances legitimacy and implementation. Network governance and a pluralistic consultation regime have therefore become integral to the European Commission’s policy-making. But the new realities put pressure on EU climate and energy policies and on their governance, resulting in more institutionalized, yet technocratic, arrangements, which include selected industry and research actors. In view of rising external threats and competition, the Commission is increasingly favoring expert-based, controlled partnerships over plural consultation, as these promise the capacity to deliver complex policy objectives and strategic autonomy quickly. The paper examines how external pressures impact interest representation at the European level through the case of hydrogen, a central element of the EU’s green industrial policy. We argue that, in order to get ahead in the race for clean technologies, the Commission employs a novel governance approach to industrial transformation that gives rise to hybrid organizations. These organizations combine the logic of interest representation with that of effective policy implementation in a quasi-public role, forming a dense network of elite actors composed of bureaucrats, corporate hydrogen stakeholders and research organizations. Specifically, the paper focuses on Hydrogen Europe, formally an industry association but de facto a co-regulator of EU industrial policy. By analyzing policy documents, public consultations, and governance structures, the paper illuminates Hydrogen Europe’s role in EU hydrogen policymaking and examines the organization’s hybrid character. This hybridity, it is argued, constitutes a prototypical model of technocratic, partnership-based governance of interest representation that has emerged in the context of the Green Deal.