Scientific Advisory Councils: Facilitating Climate Governance Implementation in Turbulent Times?

In Europe, climate governance is a multi-level system in which both the EU and Member States adopt climate objectives, policies, and set up administrative procedures. This governance pattern has emerged in times of turbulence - defined here as prolonged periods of uncertainty marked by socio-economic disruption, political contention, and escalating climate pressures (Ansell and Trondal 2018). Our article thus asks: Do Scientific Advisory Councils facilitate the effective implementation climate policy in times of turbulence? We thus investigate whether, and how, these advisory bodies contribute to climate policy stability. Drawing on institutional theory and scholarship on disruptive potential and power asymmetries, we conceptualise climate advisory councils as both mediators and strategic actors operating within contested climate governance spaces. We examine how design features of the council (capacity and independence) influence the councils’ capacity to counteract disruptive effects of turbulent political times along two dimensions (temporal shifts and parameter shifts). Empirically, the article provides structures institutional profiles through original data collected from ca.20 national climate advisory councils across Europe. We then take a closer look at several national case studies to illustrate our core argument: While climate advisory councils might not have the ability to depoliticise climate policy, they can potentially stabilise it by shaping the policy agenda, providing long-term benchmarks, and offering a narrative anchor grounded in science. However, this stabilising role depends heavily on their organizational design (Seibicke, 2025).