The European Green Deal highlights the EU’s aspirations and critical role in encouraging progressive climate policies. The EU needs to secure support for this ambitious package from a divided Europe and with no time to lose in order to reach adopted targets.

At the national level, states need to coordinate the implementation of numerous pieces of legislation across multiple sectors and in a way that is widely perceived as democratically legitimate. They need to do so in a turbulent situation, characterised by the unpredictability and profound uncertainty of the climate transition, but also of other events like the financial crisis, the pandemic and rising energy costs.

In DEAL, we study whether and how the European Green Deal generates challenges and ‘turbulence’ at the EU level, how this strategy is impacted by surrounding turbulence and how any turbulence induced by the European Green Deal impacts countries affiliated with the EU. We expect EU members and affiliated non-members to be affected differently, as non-members do not have the same access to policymaking processes at the EU level or the same internal drive as member states have, where EU matters are to a larger extent part of the domestic political debates. In order to shed light on this difference, we focus on the implementation of the European Green Deal in Norway and Denmark. We study the effects for public governance and democratic legitimacy at national level and explore how such challenges can be managed and handled.

The DEAL project is important as no other comparison of the relative turbulence experienced by EU member and non-member states and how this is dealt with has yet been undertaken. Such an analysis will, therefore, provide important lessons for other EU member and non-member states. With exception of a few reports there is also no scientific research analysing the implications of the European Green Deal for Norway or Denmark. DEAL also contributes to a nascent literature on turbulence that has only recently been applied to EU climate governance.

Project period: 2023-2026