The European Climate Law in Crisis: Constructing Urgency

In 2019, the European Parliament declared a climate emergency, drawing attention to the massive threat posed by the climate crisis and the need for urgent and ambitious action. This sense of urgency was reflected in von der Leyen’s I commitment to the European Green Deal, of which the European Climate Law formed the first major cornerstone. Five years later, however, when the European Climate Law was revised to set a 2040 emission-reduction target, the urgency of the climate crisis appeared to have been overshadowed by concerns about a competitiveness crisis. While crises have an objective dimension – their threat potential – they also contain an important subjective dimension: the amount and type of political attention they receive, which is the outcome of a social process. This subjective dimension is particularly important for a creeping crisis like the climate crisis, that has no clear beginning or end, evolves more gradually over time, and whose impacts are not immediately visible. Therefore, this paper seeks to better understand the political construction of urgency in EU climate governance. Specifically, it investigates the emergency politics surrounding the adoption of the European Climate Law in 2021 and its revision in 2025, as well as emergency politics’ impact on the policy process. As emergency politics tend to bypass slow democratic processes in favour of fast, often technocratic decision-making, they can have large implications for the legitimacy of the policy process, in particular when the policy output is perceived to be ineffective. By including this legitimacy dimension, the paper aims to connect on the one hand, the increasing crisisification of EU policymaking, and on the other, its heightened contestation in a context of constraining politicisation. The paper uses a mixed method approach, complementing a content analysis of relevant legislative documents, EU press releases, and media articles, with elite interviews with selected policymakers. In doing so, the paper promises to contribute on the EU climate and crises literature by shedding light on how urgency and emergency politics are used to further political priorities, and how this, in turn, affects the legitimacy of legislation and of the European project.