This Collection supports and amplifies research related to – SDG 9 – Industry, innovation and infrastructure, SDG 13 – Climate Action, and SDG 16 Peace, justice, and strong institutions
The Collection’s key point of departure is the expansion of climate action in the European Union from a distinct sectoral policy area to a cross-cutting general policy objective. This is particularly visible in the EU’s European Green Deal (EGD) that has framed the ambition of reaching net-zero emissions as a cross-cutting commitment to carbon neutrality, establishing core priorities of climate action as an integral element in various policy areas in the EU’s internal and external governance. In response, aspects of climate action have become part of policy discourses, narratives and contestation, including its illiberal challenges. The recent turn of the EU towards geopolitical targets creates new rationales for climate action beyond its original focus on environmental sustainability, resulting in new emphases on security, competitiveness, and trade partnerships
By approaching the politics of climate change as a source of discourse, narratives and contestation across the board and with relevance for the EU as a whole rather than as an issue of environmental politics only, the Collection explores new linkages that emerge between net-zero targets and a wider and more heterogenous range of issues, agents and jurisdictions. Using a variety of text-as-data methods, this Collection zooms in on the diversity and the interaction between various EU-level actors in promoting EGD objectives, the synergies and trade-offs between EU climate policy and economic development objectives at the level of individual member states, as well as variance in framings of EU-level climate regulations. Conceptually, the Collection focuses on policy linkages that have emerged to relate components of climate action with a broad set of topics and policies within and beyond the EU, without (implicitly) assuming their priority as suggested in parts of the literature on climate policy integration. Methodologically, its contributions scrutinize and apply innovative approaches of quantitative text analysis (or text-as-data approaches) to detect and explain (latent) patterns of policy linkages across a broader set of units of analysis and time than found in previous research.
Contributions may address one or more of the following policy linkages: Actor linkages which emerge as diverse stakeholders – from EU agencies and international organizations to political parties and civil society in different policy sectors – adopt aspects of climate action to coordinate, compete, and collaborate in new configurations. Cross-jurisdictional linkages resulting from ambitions of the EGD agenda to connect EU internal policies aiming at net-zero with external action in the fields of migration, industry and trade, creating novel dynamics between member-state, European, and non-EU climate governance. Cross-level governance linkages which bridge supranational EU institutions, national governments, and subnational actors. Policy domain linkages that enmesh aspects of environmental and climate policy with other policy areas. Finally, environmental issue-area linkages evolve as targets of climate change mitigation are re-calibrated in relation to classical environmental issue-areas such as biodiversity conservation.
Contributions will employ novel text-as-data methodological approaches to, among others, systematically trace linkage formation in EU internal and external policy across vast corpora of documents, measure linkage intensity and salience through quantitative indicators, detect patterns of contestation within and outside the EU, analyze co-occurrence patterns between actors, organizations, and policy concepts, or classify argumentative strategies used by different actors to support or oppose specific linkages.