The European Commission's Energy and Climate Policy

A Climate for Expertise?

J. Dreger

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137380258
• eBook ISBN: 9781137380265
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Energy Industry
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a deep insight into the genesis and development of the European Commission's energy and climate legislation, focusing on the interplay of politics and science. How does the Commission react when confronted with knowledge? According to the author, the Commission functions as catalyst transforming knowledge into politics.

1

Introduction: The Tension between Science and Politics

1.1 Introduction: The European Commission stretched between science and politics

When Woodrow Wilson was still Governor of New Jersey in 1912, he made a statement exposing his strong feelings about his responsibilities to democracy:

What I fear, therefore, is a government of experts. God forbid that in a democratic country we should resign the task and give the government over to experts. What are we for if we are to be scientifically taken care of by a small number of gentlemen who are the only men who understand the job? Because if we don’t understand the job, then we are not a free people. We ought to resign our free institutions and go to school to somebody and find out what it is we are about.

(cited in Smith 1991, pp. 1–2)

A hundred years later, it seems impossible to ‘find out what it is we are about’ by simply educating politicians better. Politics has grown in complexity, risks are difficult to discern and problems are so interconnected and multidimensional that experts have become a constant supporting feature for government. Expert political advice is not a new phenomenon – it is, rather, its dimensions that are new. Nowadays, there is a legion of highly specialized experts instead of broadly welleducated outstanding figures. Government is also more dispersed, with numerous civil servants filtering the expert advice given. In fact, a ‘key feature of [modern] democratic political systems is their ability to collect, generate and disseminate information and thereby to improve policies and practices’ (Gornitzka and Sverdrup May 2010, p. 1). Experts are often those who cut through the maze of interdependencies. Yet, with many simplifications come technical decisions that amount to being political in their entirety.

Classic examples of the contentiousness of scientific results in politics are manifold. The tobacco industry’s attempt to influence political decision-making through studies proving the innocuousness of smoking, the lobby battle between industry and non-governmental organizations on the dangers of genetically modified organisms, or the discussion concerning the political bias of the results of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – they all have in common the fact that the interdependencies of science and politics led to prolonged political fights during which knowledge was used to defend interests and to inform stakeholders. This work will focus on the climate and energy nexus.

In times when access to and control over information equals power, we are left to wonder with Wilson who is actually ruling whom. This book aims to shed light on the relationship between knowledge and politics that lies at the heart of many questions about the democratic quality of our political systems. If experts are those who actually prepare and make political decisions, we need not only to understand who eventually calls the shots but also what kind of legitimacy the rulers of our societies have when they take their decisions. Yet, this book will not be a discussion of legitimacy. Instead, it will lay the groundwork for future assessments by attempting to better understand the processes of knowledge utilization in politics. In particular, it will look at the juxtaposition of two main knowledge-utilization strategies: Is the institution using knowledge as a form of instrumental, cognitive learning or for argumentative politicking? And it will link these strategies to institutional functions: Is the organization interested in maximizing its power or in delivering on its mandate?

Political science is not yet able to give an answer to some of the basic questions we need to be asking: When politics meets science, is it a fruitful exchange or a struggle for dominance? And just as importantly, what happens with knowledge in this process? In the natural sciences, we observe chemical reactions during which chemical bonds of, for instance, molecules change to build new substances. In physics, substances stay the same but change their state of matter – for instance, through vaporization or freezing. When politics uses knowledge, is the very core of science preserved (does it only change the state of matter) or is it changed into something else (does it transform into new matter)?

The European Commission is a perfect object of study for scholars interested in these questions. It is at the forefront of the European integration project and is responsible for drafting the policy proposals that are supposed to constitute the European Union’s (EU’s) essence. By studying it, we can observe ‘extremely high levels of information, expertise and reason-giving [in the EU] – in large part precisely because discussions take place among competent experts in insulated forums’ (Keohane et al. 2009, p. 19), many of them organized by the Commission. Yet we are still missing a full-fledged assessment and explanation of the invisible part of the decision-making process in the EU – meaning the internal dynamics of policy formulation and decision-making within the Commission.

For too long the literature has been focused on the dispersed transnational, supranational and intergovernmental dynamics in the interplay of the EU’s legislative institutions. The official decision-making process as laid down in the treaties (Art. 251 etc.) is only the ‘tip of the iceberg’ (Guéguen and Rosberg 2004, p. 11). This is one of the core motivations for putting this study forward. Whereas many authors debate the role of the Commission as a monolith bloc in the legislative institutional triangle (European Parliament, Council of Ministers, European Commission), this book opens the black-box Commission to better understand the nature of the beast.

According to Gornitzka, we know that the Commission is drawing on the ‘largest organized information system in the EU’ in the form of 1,237 expert groups (January 2007) (Gornitzka and Sverdrup 2008, p. 733). One expert group per eight Commission officials is indeed a ‘considerable supplementary administrative resource’ (Gornitzka and Sverdrup 2010, p. 12). We also believe that the EU’s political structure favors the representation of experts and interest groups over territorial representation (Andersen and Burns 1996). However, the jury is still out on whether these experts have a significant influence on the policies that the European Commission proposes, partly because we know relatively little about the knowledge that the Commission demands and the way in which this knowledge is used in the policy formulation of this institution.

In political science literature, an understanding of the relationship between science and politics prevails that nourishes an image of two cities,

separated by some impassable chasm. One city [science] was heavenly and serene, with an almost monastic devotion to purity and truth; the other city [politics] was profane and passionate, heaving with vulgar life and all of its agonies. The earthly city needed its pure cousin’s help, but that required some bridge across the chasm. Without bridges, or with too few, it was easy to conclude that the earthly city would be mired in its profanity.

(Pal 1990, p. 143)

The European Commission has attempted to build bridges between these two cities for at least ten years. It has understood that without science, its proposals will not be sound, yet without politics, they will not be implementable. This has led to an internal differentiation in the Commission that ensures that citizens of both cities are heard. In fact, the current Commission has started to build as many bridges between science and politics that it is sometimes not easy to understand which is which anymore. Yet, the Commission is not one unified institution but many organizations in one. In fact, it is a Janus-faced institution that combines technocratic-bureaucratic and politicized elements (Christiansen 1997). Hence it constitutes a prime object for the study of learning at the interface of politics and technocracy.

The Commission combines unelected technocratic services with a highly politicized leadership structure. Its units are differentiated by function, sector and nationality (Wonka 2007, 2008), and it hosts units that are technocratic as well as units that are politicized. What constitutes appropriate behavior – in particular with regard to the utilization of knowledge – varies significantly among these units. Representatives of the politicized and technocratic units have profoundly different understandings of their task and different approaches to expertise. The first group claims that knowledge is used to ‘make the right proposals [ . . . ] our raison d’être is to be successful when we propose [ . . . ] to propose legislation in such a way that it ensures the adoption’ (Interview 31 May 2010). The second group, however, thinks that knowledge should ‘assist the European Commission in undertaking preparatory work’, ‘where the exchange of opinions [ . . . helps] clarify different concepts and [ . . . generate] new ideas’ to improve Commission proposals (Zapfel and Gardiner 2002, p. 14; Lefevere 2003, p. 176).

This book aims to tell and explain the tale of these two cities and their inhabitants in an analytic fashion. In doing so, the research tackled the question: Why and how is expert knowledge used in the policy formulation of the European Commission? It focused in particular on the question: ‘Why is expert knowledge used at different moments in the policy formulation process in the commission?, It also asked: ‘How do causal mechanisms of interaction between politics and science determine the role of experts in the policy formulation of the European Commission?, An example of causal mechanisms of interaction would be if and how the institution’s objectives of power maximization or mandate delivery cause distinct types of behavior of officials when dealing with expertise.

This work therefore seeks to contribute to the research program that Radaelli has outlined, namely analyzing ‘when and how knowledge matters in the policy process’ (Radaelli 1995, p. 160). In that sense, it fits into the research agenda of Adler and Haas of assessing who learns what, when, to whose benefit and why (Adler and Haas 1992, p. 370). In short, the process of knowledge utilization moves to the centre of attention. The argument has been made that the role of knowledge in politics is not only defined by knowledge actors and that experts are not as independent as they seem (Adler and Haas 1992; Bouwen 2002; Stone 2002; Sabatier and Weible 2007; Boswell 2008, 2009).

In assessing how the Commission learns, or rather utilizes, knowledge, this book assumes an institutional point of view. By departing from the focus of many past studies on agency, I hope to shed new light on an old topic. In particular, I aim to provide a better understanding of the way organizations affect learning architectures, of the modes of political and technocratic learning, and of the interactions between cognitive and argumentative utilizations of knowledge. In this book, a lot of work is dedicated to the discovery of potential causal mechanisms and links between experts and the Commission. The research contributes to further scholarly work on the definition of dependent and independent variables.

I believe it is high time: we know less about the emergence of preferences in the Commission than in any other European institution. Yet it is undoubtedly important to know why and how knowledge is used in the policy process, which produces legislation for nearly 500 million European citizens. Looking at policy formulation within the Commission will bring issues to the fore that have so far been ignored in the literature. Two possible examples are the role of the policy cycle and the role of hierarchy as factors of influence – elements that have been broadly overlooked by the literature on the knowledge–politics nexus.

For the purpose of this book, I assume with Bouwen that expertise constitutes a critical resource for political organizations (Bouwen 2002). Furthermore, I argue with Boswell that organizations fulfill different institutional functions (Boswell 2009), and consequently that the policy-formulation process within the Commission largely influences the way in which it learns. Arguably, institutional functions determine what kind of resource is critical for an organization. This work hypothesizes that the institutional function that an organization fulfills determines its demand for expert knowledge. Organizations pursue broadly two differing institutional strategies and demand expertise for two reasons correlated to these strategies. The first strategy is based on an organization whose function is signified by delivering on a mandate. Such an organization would demand expertise in a rather technocratic and instrumental fashion, trying to increase its ability to deliver performance with enhanced expert insight into its tasks. Expertise, for such an organization, is understood as a critical resource because it enhances the cognitive ability of the organization to understand problems and policy options. The second strategy identified is employed by an organization, which is mainly concerned with maximizing its power. These kinds of organization have a critical resource of legitimacy and support. Expertise is then demanded to substantiate and justify positions, so it serves this organization as an argument.

The dependent variable in this context is the utilization of expert knowledge. Whereas expert knowledge can be used in various ways, this usage can essentially be categorized as either cognitive or argumentative. In cognitive utilization, expert knowledge serves actors to better understand an issue to make a choice. In argumentative utilization, expert knowledge serves actors to better justify a choice already made. This theoretical argument resonates with one discourse in European studies that goes back to the organizational studies literature as pursued by March and Olsen (March 1988; March and Olsen 1976; March and Simon 1958), and more recently other scholars (Boswell 2009; Egeberg 2006b; Brunsson 2002; Cini 2000a).

1.2 Experts and knowledge: Definitions and their boundedness

The knowledge used by the Commission does not appear out of nowhere: it has been produced and it has been conveyed to the institution. Therefore, a short discourse on experts as knowledge producers and mediators follows. To better understand the underlying dynamics of knowledge utilization, some basic definitions should be provided upfront. Definition exercises are, by their very nature, context-bound. An outstanding example was attributed to Jorge-Luis Borges by Goertz:

On those remote pages [of an ancient Chinese encyclopedia] it is written that animals are divided into (1) those that belong to the emperor, (2) embalmed ones, (3) those that are trained, (4) suckling pigs, (5) mermaids, (6) fabulous ones, (7) stray dogs, (8) those that are included in this classification, (9) unnumerable ones, (10) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (11) others, (12), those that have just broken a flower vase, (13) those that resemble flies from a distance.

(Goertz 2006, p. 27)

Literature does not provide a clear-cut and convincing definition of ‘expert’. I would therefore ask the reader to bear with me when I add another definition of ‘expert’ to what seems to be one of the most challenging definitional exercises that political science has embarked upon. I am basing my definition on reflections of scholars investigating epistemic communities (Haas 1992, p. 3; Bulmer and Padgett 2004, p. 134; Sabatier and Weible 2007, pp. 194–195), think tanks and networks (Mayntz 1985, pp. 9–10; Jann 1994, p. 160; Gellner 1994, p. 176, 1998, p. 83; Stone 2000, pp. 45–46), lobbyists (Crombez 2002, p. 27) and expertise in politics at large (Weiss and Bucuvalas 1980; Radaelli 1995, p. 164, 2002, p. 206; Gornitzka and Sverdrup 2008, p. 727, May 2010, pp. 5–6).

At the outset, I believe it is important to point out that I do not necessarily support the view that experts play an independent role in politics that is widely advocated in the literature (Adler and Haas 1992; Stone 2002; Sabatier and Weible 2007). Rather, I believe that there is, at least, interdependence between the Commission and experts (Gornitzka and Sverdrup 2008, p. 727; see also Bouwen 2002; Boswell 2008, 2009). Bearing this interdependence in mind, I define experts as knowledge mediators between the worlds of science and politics. They speak with authority on an issue and base their claim to authority on their superior insights, typically on scientific grounds. Experts share a commitment to causal reasoning, a solid knowledge base and shared discursive practices. I distinguish two categories of expert, which differ mainly regarding interests that they are affiliated with.

The first category of experts is formed essentially by academics independent from stakeholder interests, yet subject to the organizational interest of their affiliated research institution and their personal interests. They derive their authority from scientific excellence, be it in the natural or social sciences. The second category of expert essentially comprises advocatic experts who share normative and principled beliefs as well as a common policy enterprise with their affiliated institution, be they think tanks or interest groups. They derive their authority additionally from an association with stakeholders which are affected by a policy in the making (cf. also Linquist’s concept of the ‘third community’: Linquist 1990, p. 31).

I do exclude, however, lobbyists who act without a scientifically informed background as outlined above. It is the claim to superior knowledge that distinguishes an expert. I acknowledge, though, that the convenient dichotomy that Gagnon described between science and politics is blurred: ‘Science is motivated by a devotion to objective and open inquiry, reason, and truth. Politics, concerned with power and interests, is essentially vulgar as it does not respect the exacting and uncompromising canons of scientific rationality’ (Gagnon and Alain-G. 1990, p. 3). In such a black-and-white world, words are, to quote Max Weber, either ‘Pflugscharen zur Lockerung des Erdreiches des kontemplativen Denkens’ or ‘Schwerter gegen die Gegner: Kampfmittel’ (‘plowshares to loosen the soil of contemplative thought‘ or ‘swords against the enemies: weapons‘) (Weber 2002, pp. 496–497).

However, as Mayntz has argued, the dual model of science and politics is merging in some countries, and with regard to the EU it seems that policy networks have certainly diminished the opposition of political and factual logic (Mayntz 1994, pp. 17, 24–27). Once experts take a mediating role – as a ‘transmission belt’ between science and politics (Haas 2004, p. 587) – they can take a stand and thereby fulfill a task that Lampinen describes as converting ‘scientific findings to policy recommendations’ (Lampinen 1992, p. 24). Experts offer knowledge in varying aggregate forms, from data to information, from ideas to arguments (Weiss and Bucuvalas 1980). Knowledge utilization, then, has to be defined as the ‘conscious use of scientific research in policy formulation and decision-making’ (Lampinen 1992, p. 29). One of the main thrusts of this work is to shed more light on the motivations and dynamics of exactly this consciousness underlying the utilization of knowledge in policy-making.

1.3 Climate and energy policy: Turning facts into policies

In short, this project aims to offer one of the first political science studies of the emergence of the proposals for the current climate and energy policy of the EU. It opens the black-box European Commission to disentangle and analyze the politics of knowledge within the institution that ultimately proposes policies in the EU. It offers a detailed look at the dynamics of policy-making within a hierarchically differentiated European Commission, including an analysis of its degree of politicization and the first account of strategies of knowledge utilization with regard to EU climate policies. In particular, this work offers an in-depth analysis of the proposals for the emissions trading directive and its revision, as well as the renewable energy directive. The energy and climate package 2008 was more comprehensive and included proposals for a burden-sharing agreement, and a carbon-capture and -storage directive, and it has to be seen in the context of emerging policies for energy efficiency in buildings, limits on car emissions and so on. This book focuses on the cornerstones of this legislative agenda: the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and renewables.

This book focuses on the emergence of a new policy field – climate policy – and on the development of previously unknown policy instruments in energy and climate policy. The topic is fascinating for a number of reasons. First, the EU seems to be responsible for up to 28 per cent of historical greenhouse-gas emissions (Dellink et al. 2008), it is a global player in the climate negotiations and accordingly it needs to implement credible policies at home ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: The Tension between Science and Politics
• 2. The Commission’s Strategies for Designing an Emissions Trading Scheme for the European Union
• 3. The Commission’s Puzzling and Powering over the Revision of the Emissions Trading Scheme
• 4. The Commission’s Approach to Devising the Renewables Directive
• 5. Conclusion: The Commission as a Catalyst between Knowledge and Politics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index