Towards harder soft governance? Monitoring climate policy in the EU

Abstract

In the emerging debate on 'harder soft governance,' the relationship between hard and soft elements has not been fully explored. This paper addresses this gap by looking at the changing nature of policy monitoring, a quintessentially soft governance mechanism. It focuses on climate change, a dynamic site of policy expansion and experimentation in which the EU has historically been an international frontrunner. This paper finds that a range of 'harder' elements have been added to the EU's climate policy monitoring over time, including more explicit legal provisions, greater external publicity, and more concrete links to other policy processes. These changes have emerged from politically sensitive negotiations between many actors, principally the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Environment Agency (who together have generally favoured greater hardening), and Member States (some of whom preferred softer governance) in the context of changing international opportunities and constraints. Moving forward, this paper highlights the need for more research on the efficacy of policy monitoring, especially with respect to the EU's significantly more ambitious long-term decarbonisation targets.

Harder soft governance in European climate and energy policy: exploring a new trend in public policy

“…If soft governance does not generate the hoped-for effects, the resulting dissatisfaction can drive change towards HSG (Schoenefeld & Jordan, 2020). Pressure emanating from the issue at stakesuch as climate and energy policy in our casecan further exacerbate a sense of dissatisfaction and build a perceived urgency for change.…”

“…Harder elements are then added in the process and potentially by skilled entrepreneurial activities of single or multiple institutions and/or in order to increase the effectiveness of the governance approach. This is usually done in response to a perceived underperformance of purely soft governance (see Schoenefeld & Jordan, 2020).…”

“…For example, actors may capitalise on previous and successful instances of HSG in other areas, or they may link their endeavours to broader governance trends. More concretely, the probability for HSG rises with promising opportunities: Are there ways in which naming and shaming can be conducted, as is the case with organisations such as the OECD (Lehtonen, 2020) or the European Environment Agency (Schoenefeld & Jordan, 2020)? To what extent are there opportunities for bundling within the same field or policy field coupling, generating for example sanctioning potential as had been suggested in the case of the emerging Energy Union (Knodt et al, 2020)?…”

“…Policy entrepreneurswho may be public or private actors may entice the Member States to agree on HSG and therefore ensure some adherence to commonly agreed policy goals by varying the degree of hardness during negotiation processes. For example, the European Commission became a key entrepreneur in inserting harder elements into the Energy Union governance proposal, in particular by inserting a formula to calculate renewable contributions, as well as by bundling monitoring obligations and publishing them in the highly visible State of the Energy Union reports (Knodt et al, 2020;Schoenefeld & Jordan, 2020;Schoenefeld & Knodt, 2021; see also Eckhard & Jankauskas, 2019). Taken together, entrepreneurial activities towards HSG have proven to be a crucial factor in the papers in this special issue.…”

Distinguishing policy surveillance from policy tracking: transnational municipal networks in climate and energy governance

“…Countries' efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are monitored through regular reports. To ensure compliance, the EU has embraced monitoring and reporting of GHG emissions by relying on PS (Ringel & Knodt, 2018;Schoenefeld, Hildén, & Jordan, 2018;Schoenefeld & Jordan, 2020).…”