The EU’s emissions trading system (ETS) covers almost half of its greenhouse gas emissions and has been hailed as the cornerstone and flagship of EU climate policy. In spring 2013, however, the ETS was in severe crisis, with a huge surplus of allowances and a sagging carbon price. Even a formally simple measure to change the timing of auctioning was initially rejected by the European Parliament. Two years later, a much more important, quantity-focused “market thermostat” (the market stability reserve) was adopted, and proposals for a complete ETS overhaul were put on the table. This article examines how it was possible to turn the flagship around so quickly, providing insights into the mechanisms for gradually rendering emissions trading systems more effective. Crucial changes at the EU and national levels are identified, chief among them changes in Germany and in the European Parliament. Furthermore, the quantity-based tightening mechanism discussed could be of relevance for carbon markets outside Europe.

The reform of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) adopted in November 2017 was surprisingly strong, given the previous opposition from central member‐states like Poland and key stakeholders like the energy‐intensive industries. The carbon price has also increased substantially since then. To explain why such major reform was possible, we present several findings with wider relevance. Importantly, all the actors pushing for a more ambitious reform benefitted from having a central, “second‐best” mechanism in place—the Market Stability Reserve (MSR)—which could be further tightened. By focusing cancelation on allowances in the MSR and taking place only after 2023, policy entrepreneurs managed to make the distribution of costs obscure and diffuse, whereas the benefits (a probable higher carbon price and related greater auctioning revenues for member‐states) were more specific and closer in time. That is what we call “smokescreen politics.”

Can non-EU member states influence the EU’s energy policy? The Europeanization of energy policy in third countries is often described as a one-directional process in which these countries essentially adopt the EU <em>energy acquis</em>. Our article questions this dominant view by exploring whether and how third countries can influence the formulation and implementation of EU energy policy. We argue that relative differences in third country influence depend on their access to relevant venues and actors of EU policy-making as well as their structural power resources. We develop a typology linking these two factors to the outsider, follower, challenger, or shaper roles that third countries assume in EU energy governance. We empirically probe our argument in three case studies representing different models of EU–third country cooperation. Our cases include a group of nine Southeast and East European countries (Energy Community), Switzerland (bilateral arrangements), and Norway (European Economic Area). The analysis shows that it is access and structural power which together define the extent to which third countries are able to influence the formulation of EU energy policy and customize its implementation to their domestic needs. We find that while the Energy Community members are followers in EU energy governance, Switzerland and Norway are shapers. Strikingly, the influence of these two non-EU members may occasionally even surpass that of smaller EU member states. This highlights that third countries are not merely downloading EU energy regulation but sometimes also succeed in uploading their own preferences. Our contribution has implications for the post-Brexit EU–UK energy relations and qualifies claims about EU regulatory hegemony in the wider region.

EU agencies are increasingly subject to a flurry of stakeholder bodies. Despite their prevalence, and the considerable variation in structures formally professed to serve the same purpose, we know little about the actor preferences driving the set-up of such structures or the potential implications of specific institutional design choices. We systematically map structural variations across EU agencies and analyse to what extent the establishment and the design of stakeholder bodies is principal-imposed or agency-initiated. Do stakeholder structures enhance political control serving to broadly legitimise agencies, or to the contrary, do they reflect preferences of the bureaucratic actors they are meant to control, and with what implications? We find that, for the most part, weak principal control and steering leaves it to the agencies themselves to design stakeholder bodies as they see fit. This has the potential to introduce unsanctioned biases in favour of specific groups, potentially depleting rather than bolstering legitimacy. A major implication of EU agencies' stakeholder engagement is that the agency model is currently in flux, moving away from the classic insulated agency towards greater politicization in regulatory policy.