Governing under turbulence: The European Green Deal and implications for Norway (DEAL)

About the project

The transition to climate neutrality in society is extraordinary and unavoidable: reaching the world’s climate goals requires a transition of a nature, scale and tempo never witnessed before. Introducing the European Green Deal, the European Commission has set a strategy to make Europe the first climate neutral continent in the world.

DEAL assumes that the European Green Deal represents a distinct governance challenge with legitimacy implications. One set of issues pertains to the extraordinary speed, comprehensive and cross-sectoral nature of the Green Deal. 

Another set of issues pertains to the forms of governing and political turbulence that such a process entails. Turbulence can, for example, disrupt the balance between political leadership and independent expertise or between electoral representation and interest group involvement. Likewise, it can constrain (or be perceived to constrain) a country’s autonomy and sovereignty. DEAL is concerned with how these challenges manifest themselves in the development of the European Green Deal at EU level as well as in the implementation of the Green Deal at national level.

Comparing Norway and Denmark, DEAL is interested in understanding the consequence of the turbulence that the European Green Deal creates for governance and legitimacy of the climate transition in these countries and whether the extent of challenges is related to EU affiliation.

DEAL will study the European Green Deal as a governing challenge along different dimensions:

• The nature of the turbulence challenge at the EU level (Work package 2)
• The consequences of these challenges for governance at domestic level (Work package3)
• The implications for democratic legitimacy (Work package 4)
• The theoretical and practical ramifications (Work package 1 and 5).

This is important because of the urgent need to understand the development of European Green Deal and its implications for Norwegian and Danish restructuring and use of policy instruments. 

See also the project page on CICERO's website. 

Cooperation

CICERO

Fridtjof Nansen Institute

NIBIO