Friends or Foes? The Impact of Cohesion Policy on Public Support for EU Climate Policy

The EU’s European Green Deal strategy aims to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 and a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. As this transition will be costly, especially due to rising energy costs, the EU’s Cohesion Policy (CP) has been increasingly reoriented to support poorer member states and regions in the process. However, while the EU promotes the potential synergies of integrating its cohesion and climate policies, studies increasingly highlight that climate action involves significant distributive conflict and tensions between environmental and social policies. This raises the question about the conflict potential of integrating EU cohesion and climate policies, and about the relationship between distributive and climate policy goals at the EU level more generally. Existing research has mainly dealt with similar questions at the national level, while the EU level remains severely under-researched, despite its important role in leading the energy transition in Europe. In this paper, we are specifically interested in the impact of CP payments on citizens’ support for EU environmental and climate policies. Drawing on arguments from policy feedback (PF) theories and the distributive politics of climate change, we argue that the receipt of CP payments tends to reduce support for EU environmental and climate policies, which is counterproductive to the integration of the two policy areas. Since environmental protection and redistribution are financed from the same EU budget, this may create perceptions of trade-offs between funding for these policy areas. In this situation, the short-term economic self-interests of EU citizens tend to trump support for long-term investments in climate change mitigation, reducing support for the latter. As a result, citizens in regions receiving higher levels of CP are less likely to support EU environmental and climate policies because they fear losing past benefits. We test our arguments using data on CP payments in 203 regions in 27 EU member states between 2007 and 2018, as well as over 38000 survey responses from two Eurobarometer waves in 2018. Using multilevel logistic regression and an instrumental variable approach, we find robust support for our expectations. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of policy feedback in the EU, and potential conflicts between EU policies that may undermine the achievement of its climate neutrality goals and citizens' support for European integration more generally. In particular, they foreshadow a potential backlash against the integration of EU cohesion and climate policies.