The Politics of Technical Policymaking: The Rise of Delegated and Implementing Acts in EU Climate Governance and Its Implications

Apart from a few landmark studies, political scientists often neglect the analysis of delegated and implementing acts in EU governance due to their “technical” rather than “political” purposes. However, the increasing employment of these two mechanisms of executive decision-making bears tremendous consequences for the speed and scope of the EU’s decarbonisation agenda. In this paper, we study how delegated and implementing acts contribute to policymaking efficiency and any potential trade-offs for democracy. Our empirical analysis consists of a database of all non-legislative processes pertaining to climate policy since 2020 initiated by DG CLIMA, DG ENER, and other relevant DGs as well as a content analysis of delegated and implementing acts attached to three core components of the EU’s climate program: The Renewable Energy Directive, the Emissions Trading System Directive, and the EU Taxonomy Regulation. This documentary analysis is triangulated with 20 semi-structured interviews conducted with policymakers working at the European Commission, the European Parliament, the permanent representations of EU member states, as well as senior staff at NGOs and law firms working on climate issues in Brussels. We find that non-legislative processes have been used more frequently over time, and are a rapid means to update or clarify policy: implementing act processes are completed quickly, with delegated act processes taking somewhat longer. However, non-legislative processes tend to sideline or only partially reflect certain key features of democratic governance systems: including representation, accountability, participation, and knowledge. Furthermore, the lines between technical and political matters have become blurred, with delegated acts increasingly subject to lobbying and impacting the scope of the EU’s green transition beyond what may be expected from a non-political method of decision-making. Our results highlight an important tension in EU climate policymaking between the need for efficient policymaking and democratic decision-making—in other words, between rapid emissions reductions and policymaking procedures that are inclusive, fair and just. More research is required to study this tension, and to draw attention to it, particularly in a constrained political context in which climate action is a lower priority, especially following the results of the 2024 European elections.