Research Papers

In its 2006 Action Plan for Energy Efficiency, the European Commission discovered the regulation of energy performance as a major instrument to combat climate change and at the same time to reduce the dependency on imported oil and gas. With the aim of consuming 20% less energy by 2020, the Action Plan identified ten "priority areas" where specific energy-saving measures should be formulated. Set in the "cluster 2" and the "energy-climate axis" of the workshop, this contribution will examine the fate of the two most far-ranging proposals: Efficiency standards for energy-using consumer products quot; exemplified by the recent phase-out of incandescent light-bulbs quot; and a regulation from 2009 to reduce the fuel consumption of passenger-cars. Against the backdrop of the EU's institutional propensity to stalemate (the notorious "joint-decision traps"), the paper asks how it became possible to adopt these rather ambitious measures in spite of fierce contestation. It traces different mechanisms of conflict resolution, focusing in particular on the relevance of the level of de-facto (as opposed to de jure) decision-making: While the bargaining breakthrough in negotiating the fuel-saving regulation was achieved only during bilateral Franco-German talks on the summit level, the incandescents phase-out was facilitated by expert decision-making in technical "comitology" committees. Although fundamentally different in terms of the level of politicisation and situated on opposite ends of the decision hierarchy, both shifts away from the formal arenas of legislation, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, were crucial in breaking stalemate. Not only were potential opponents kept at bay; the respective institutional environments were also more amenable to facilitating agreement by means of diffuse reciprocity (in the case of the fuel saving regulation) or technical rationality (in the case of the incandescents phase-out).