Reshaping the European Green Deal in times of turbulence: a comparative analysis of the implementation in Italy and France

In a context of rampant instability and turbulence, greening public policies becomes an imperative endeavour and necessitates sound research and evidence to support it. Thus, this paper aims to evaluate the diverging implementation of the European Green Deal (EGD) in Italy and France. It conducts a qualitative comparative case study for the period 2019-2025 and it analyses the variation in Italy’s and France’s climate policy ambition. I hereby collect national and European legislation, policy reports and grey literature on the topic, especially focusing on the temporal dimension of each piece of policymaking: indeed, the 2024 and 2025 implementation of the EGD takes place in a radically changed context with respect to the initial enthusiasm that characterised the beginning of the previous European Parliament’s mandate. From the great public concern favouring the adoption of the EGD in 2019 we are now in more worrying periods for climate pledges, since in the von der Leyen II Commission, competitiveness and simplification have taken precedence, weakening the momentum of the climate transition. Hence, the objective of the article is to investigate how the EGD is reshaped by such a shift in focus towards the EU’s Clean Industrial Deal as well as towards ongoing discussions on the future adoption of the Circular Economy Act in 2026, which will also affect emissions-related commitments. As for the two member states under scrutiny, Italy and France differ in important ways, as far as implementation schemes, government effectiveness and climate ambition are concerned. I thus ground my discussion to existing evidence including the Sustainable Governance Indicators, the Worldwide Governance Indicators, the Sustainable Development Report, the Environmental Performance Index, the Climate Change Performance Index, and the ND-GAIN Country Index. In light of the great amount of information available, a plurality of longitudinal analyses of the evolution of EU and national climate policies is imperative to identify the change of objectives, instruments and stakeholders over time. Document analysis is fundamental in this regard, as well as database and content analysis of main public policy texts. These insights are integrated with semi-structured interviews to bring even richer contributions and help understand rigorously such unfolding. The involved institutions of democratic governance at EU and member state level have not deeply evolved or formally changed to respond to the climate crisis but they have indeed elaborated very different implementation patterns: according to provisional findings, France is better equipped compared to Italy, especially for what concerns the cogency of its laws, plans and strategies, and the effectiveness of its implementation structures.