Linking EU Climate and Energy Policies—Decision-making, Implementation and Reform by Jon Birger Skjærseth et al. (review)

An ambitious climate and energy policy (known colloquially as 20-20-20) was set unanimously by EU leaders in 2007/2008 and enacted into law in 2009. The four authors of this book are committed to exploring the causes and consequences of what they see as "a combined climate and energy policy package that departed significantly from the status quo" (p. 25). The inadequacy in traditional theories of EU integration, policymaking, and implementation to explain this outcome is obvious. The authors therefore opted to include negotiation theory on issue linkage to develop an integrated framework for analysis. Perhaps the most noteworthy strength of this book is causes and effects of process and outcome of the EU climate and energy policy package comparatively.

According to negotiation theory, EU climate policy would "reflect the position of the least ambitious actor when unanimity is required" (p. 3). This outcome, however, was not reflected in reality. The inconsistency prompted Skjærseth et al. to propose three compelling answers—with the help of an issue-linkage perspective—to explain how this was possible: combining different issues into a package; compensating "losers" by adding issues such as side payments; and creating synergies by which policies for climate objectives could also reduce air pollution and create new green jobs. What's more, they distinguish between functional and political linkages to reveal how the EU has been able to adopt increasingly ambitious climate policies by linking energy issues and policies. Political linkage is defined by whether climate and energy policies are initiated, recommended, and adopted concurrently by the same set of policymakers.

The researchers apply two complementary approaches to explain why and how such policies developed in the first place: Liberal Intergovernmentalism (LI) and Multi-Level Governance (MLG). From an LI perspective, the initiation and adoption of climate and energy policies would be expected to "reflect the interests, preferences and actions of the member states and their intergovernmental bargaining" (p. 3). MLG is the dispersion of authority across multiple levels of political governance. Over the last several decades, authority has moved away from traditional national governments in Europe not just to the supranational level within the EU, but also to subnational levels (e.g., regional assemblies and local authorities). The latter approach may "explain the initiation and adoption of EU climate and energy policies as a result of complex bargaining at multiple governance levels that include EU institutions, non-state actors and member state governments" (p. 4). The authors explore two main approaches to explain variation in implementation. The first centers on degree of "fit" between EU requirements and the national status quo; the second focuses on the relationship between EU and domestic politics. The reform phase of policies can also be analyzed from the abovementioned explanatory perspectives.

The authors selected four countries (Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Poland) to ensure the richness and deepness of empirical analysis. These countries are confronted with a range of different challenges and opportunities with respect to decarbonizing their economies because of their significant variation in energy mix and import dependency. The analysis focuses on the directive reforming the EU emissions trading system (EU ETS), the Effort-Sharing Decision (ESD), the Renewable Energy Directive (RED), and the Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) Directive. The authors examine two climate policies for the transport sector—the car emissions regulation and the Fuel Quality Directive (FQD)—for a subset of countries.

The authors extracted empirically testable propositions from various theoretical perspectives and examined them with a combination of methodological techniques (including pattern-matching, process tracing and explanation-building). They collected qualitative data from multiple sources, including energy statistics, official papers, secondary literature, and semistructured interviews.

Linking EU Climate and Energy Policies should be read by all who are interested in climate and energy policy and governance. There are some limitations to the study, as its authors acknowledge: it is widely...