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With the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the European Council has become an official institution of the European Union (EU). According to the Treaty, it should provide the Union with 'impetus' and 'general political directions and priorities'. The explicit exclusion of any legislative functions seems to demarcate its role clearly from that of the European Commission, which retains the formal monopoly over legislative initiative. However, Treaty provisions have not prevented the European Council and its President from informally setting the agenda in a detailed way, often creating tension with the Commission. By looking into three high profile cases -the energy climate package, economic governance reform and Schengen reform -through the prism of two theoretical approaches -the principal agent model and 'joint agenda setting' approach -this article explores patterns of interactions between the two institutions in legislative agenda setting and shows that the relationship can be best defined in terms of 'competitive cooperation'.

Article impact statement: Questions regarding freshwater ecosystem conservation, role of social structure in human-environment interactions, and impacts of conservation need more attention. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.[3] AbstractIn 2008, a group of conservation scientists compiled a list of 100 priority questions for the conservation of the world's biodiversity [Sutherland et al. (2009) Conservation Biology, 23, 557-567]. However, now almost a decade later, no one has yet published a study gauging how much progress has been made in addressing these 100 high-priority questions in the peer-reviewed literature. Here we take a first step toward re-examining the 100 questions and identify key knowledge gaps that still remain. Through a combination of a questionnaire and a literature review, we evaluated each of the 100 questions on the basis of two criteria: relevance and effort. We defined highly-relevant questions as those which -if answered -would have the greatest impact on global biodiversity conservation, while effort was quantified based on the number of review publications addressing a particular question, which we used as a proxy for research effort. Using this approach we identified a set of questions that, despite being perceived as highly relevant, have been the focus of relatively few review publications over the past ten years. These questions covered a broad range of topics but predominantly tackled three major themes: the conservation and management of freshwater ecosystems, the role of societal structures in shaping interactions between people and the environment, and the impacts of conservation interventions. We see these questions as important knowledge gaps that have so far received insufficient attention and may need to be prioritised in future research. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.[4]

This paper looks at the way policy entrepreneurs construct horizontal coherence through problem definition and the promotion of policy frames that bond different objectives and instruments together. Building on the case of the 2009 climate and energy package, the paper analyses how the European Commission and successive European Union Presidencies exploited a growing climate change momentum to devise, assemble and facilitate the adoption in an exceptionally short period of an ambitious legislative package cutting across traditional sectoral boundaries. The recourse to a narrative presenting Europe at the vanguard of a green revolution and the framing of European internal policies as a tool for international climate leadership were instrumental in constructing the package as a coherent response to the joint energy and climate change challenges, and in rallying wide support. However, the paper shows that the institutionalization of this framing has been undermined by the economic crisis and stalled international negotiations.

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This article examines the impact of enlargement on European Union (EU) performance in energy and climate change policies. It looks at process-driven performance, focusing especially on agenda-setting, negotiation dynamics and institutional changeas well outcome-driven performance, looking at policy objectives and their implementation. The empirical analysis is based on qualitative, comparative case studies of EU climate change and energy security policies. We argue that, although recent enlargements have not led to permanent institutional deadlock or a stable Eastern coalition, they have contributed to bringing some issues back to the top of the European agendasuch as the security of gas suppliesas well as to fuel old debatesin particular the issue of burden sharing in climate change negotiations. In terms of outcome, enlargement has not prevented the adoption of relatively ambitious climate legislation, although Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) have been able to obtain significant concessions. Besides, CEECs have made a positive, although limited, contribution to improving EU security. However, their impact may further increase as the paper points to their renewed assertiveness in both energy security and climate policy in recent years.

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