An ever-growing influence through climate policy: The EU’s supranational efforts to build a shipping policy

Since the adoption of the European Green Deal in 2019, the European Commission has developed a series of policies, based on the Fit for 55 package and the European Climate Law, to achieve climate neutrality on the European continent by 2050. These policies span over the majority -if not the totality- of all the sectors the European Union (EU) legislates for. One of such sectors is maritime transport, for which measures to reduce its climate footprint were put into force, for the first time only in 2024. Some earlier efforts had been put in place since 2015, but only for monitoring and reporting greenhouse gas emissions from ships. What has to be noted here is that the EU does not have a coherent shipping policy. There were some efforts in the first decades of the creation of the European Economic Community, with ​an emphasis on tackling unfair competition, but since the 1980s, no specific policies have been put forward for maritime transport per se. Later, it was seen as part of the broader Integrated Maritime Policy, which had a holistic approach to maritime activities, with very few (if any at all) provisions for shipping. Nevertheless, the comprehensive climate system of the EU and the efforts to decarbonize all human activities, have opened a new window of opportunity for the EU to shape a climatized maritime transport policy. This article aims to explore how the supranational institutions, and particularly the European Commission, through the promotion of climate policy, expand their competence in a field that has been kept out of the European sphere for a long time and where, up until a certain point, they had not had much influence. The exploration of this process will be based on aspects of the approaches of historical institutionalism, internal normative power (Dikaios 2024) and public policy, with emphasis ​in policymaking, while methodologically process tracing approach will be utilized. The evidence for the article will be based on the analysis of primary and secondary sources, as well as on a series of interviews with key stakeholders from the European Commission. The goal of the article is to unbox the way a “new” policy field, i.e., a shipping policy, is being evolved -which the (shipping) industry abhors- in the EU, through the sprawling of another policy, in this case the EU climate policy.