From Green Deal to Clean Deal? How the European Commission Justifies Paradigm Change

With the European Green Deal the EU articulated a policy paradigm centred on ecological modernization, with references made to climate neutrality, ecological transition, and socially balanced decarbonization. In the wake of the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and increasing competition over clean-tech supply chains, these framings remained first astonishingly stable but the EGD became slowly recalibrated in the following three years. This paper traces these shifts by analysing Commission communications, speeches, and strategy documents from 2019 to 2025. Conceptually, we draw the sociology of justification by Luc Boltanski to understand how institutions justify public action through broader normative logics, and Peter Hall’s work on distinctions between policy goals, instruments, and instrument settings to identify evolving paradigmatic orientations. We identify two overlapping but distinct paradigms in Commission discourse. The initial EGD paradigm foregrounded environmental integrity, long-term sustainability, and fairness, supported by regulatory tightening and economy-wide transition instruments. From 2023 onward, a second paradigm gained prominence, in which climate policy is increasingly justified through concerns about energy security, industrial competitiveness, supply-chain resilience, and technological leadership and is reflected in altered policy goals and new policy instruments. The paper contributes to debates on discursive institutionalism, policy change and the role of discourses in the European Union.