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Multilevel ‘venue shopping’: The case of EU’s Renewables Directive

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Abstract

Lobbying has traditionally been an enterprise of national interest organizations, which chiefly seek to influence national actors, especially governments. However, studies find that national interest organizations increasingly also target the European Union (EU). As the EU agenda has increased in depth and scope, interest organizations at national and EU political levels might be expected to align in coalitions in order to influence EU legislation. Such strategies potentially increase interest organizations’ political leverage significantly; despite that, lobbying coalitions consisting of organizations aligned to different political levels have been scantily studied in the literature on EU lobbying. Therefore, the first aim of the article is to illustrate a case where coalition lobbying is highly likely: the lobbying strategies employed by the interest organizations of Germany’s energy industries in the process leading up to the EU’s Renewable Energy Directive. These industries are represented by several organizations at both the national and the European level. The second aim of the article is an investigation into how the Renewables Directive came about, as the outcome has profound impact on power production and consumption, and future prospects for EUs mitigation of greenhouse gases. Large controversy was connected to the legal proscriptions of support mechanisms for enhancing renewable energy production in particular. Two of the organizations that would be the most severely affected by the Renewables Directive were the European utilities industry and renewables industry, together constituting all power producers and their affiliates in Europe. The utilities and renewables industries disagreed deeply on core issues, such as legislation on support mechanisms for expanding production of renewable energy in the EU. The utilities industry favored an EU-wide green certificate scheme, whereas the renewables industry pressed for national choice of support mechanisms. Because the stakes were high, both had large incentives to invest substantial resources into lobbying on this legislation. The third aim of the article is to discuss what such multilevel lobbying reveals about perceptions of where real decision-making power is located in the EU. Energy policy is traditionally a strong national domain, which makes the governance theory of liberal intergovernmentalism (LI) relevant to use. However, as the EU is increasingly expanding its legislation on energy issues, the multilevel governance theory (MLG) also might describe how interest organizations perceive power to be located when EU legislation is formulated.The results indicate that despite all lobbying that organizations targeted toward the German government, which played a key role in the negotiations, the observations of the lobbying behavior is still better described by MLG than LI; the limited leverage of LI is illustrated by three points. First, all the German interest organizations lobbied institutions at both the national and at the EU levels. Second, national and European interest organizations participated in informal multilevel political coalitions consisting of a broad church of actors, as regards the renewables industry in particular. By coordinating political positions, pooling resources and developing common strategies, the interest organizations probably increased their leverage substantially, not the least because these coalitions also were backed by governments in key member states and members of the European Parliament. Third, all the EU-level interest organizations lobbied both the core EU institutions and central national governments. Summing up, these findings suggest that multilevel strategies should be considered for inclusion in analyses of national and European-level interest organizations’ lobbying of EU legislation. The interest organizations themselves seem to see power as distributed across multiple levels of governance, and lobby accordingly. In order to grasp momentum of the lobbying process, it is moreover often probably relevant to assess coordination of strategies between interest organizations at different levels in complex multilevel advocacy coalitions. By demonstrating that all organizations covered, regardless of sizes and resources, lobbied at multiple governance levels, this study also nuances the picture of which actors participate in EU policymaking. When legislation on crucial issues is created, small national interest organizations might also target EU institutions. Finally, at least one national interest organization cooperated with private companies to share tasks and enhance lobbying strength. Such cooperation between an interest organization and its private members is a relevant topic of research in future studies on interest organizations.

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Notes

  1. Industry is here understood as all the organizations, businesses and other enterprises connected to a particular form of energy production, such as the energy producers, equipment manufacturers, labor organizations and so on.

  2. The utilities industry might be defined as the conventional power producers and their affiliates, including the large companies producing electricity and heat from nuclear power, coal, gas and hydropower and their equipment suppliers.

  3. The renewables industry might be defined as the producers of energy from renewable energy sources and their affiliates, such as renewables equipment manufacturers. Many utilities companies also produce electricity from renewable energy sources. However, the distinction is appropriate because the companies that mainly produce conventional power and the companies that focus on producing power from the ‘new’ renewable energy technologies often have had very different political interests, both in Germany and in the EU.

  4. The largest renewable energy technologies apart from hydro power in Germany at the time were bio power, wind power and solar power. Hydro power is not included because power produced from this source is already cost-competitive in comparison to power from coal and does therefore not need support.

  5. The other main targets were reducing greenhouse gas emissions with 20 per cent from the 1990 levels and improve EUs energy efficiency with 20 per cent within 2020. The three targets are famously known as the 20–20–20 targets.

  6. Table 3 describes the main arguments in the debates.

  7. Table 1 gives an overview of the coalition of the German utilities’ interest organizations and their fellows.

  8. Table 1 gives an overview of the coalition of the renewables interest organizations and the other groups that shared their views.

  9. EURELECTRIC and the rest of the coalition that was pro a European certificate trading system is described closer in Table 2.

  10. The European renewables interest organizations and the rest of the coalition pro national choice of support mechanisms are described in Table 2.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank several people, including my supervisor Morten Egeberg, as well as Øivind Bratberg, Per Ove Eikeland, Torbjørg Jevnaker, Amund Lie, Kadri Miard, Trond Ydersbond and two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments. Susan Høivik contributed with helpful language advice. Financial assistance from the Fridtjof Nansen Institute and the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Appendix

Appendix

Respondents, by affiliation

Germany

BEE

BBE

BWE (2 interviewees)

BDI

BDEW (2 interviewees)

The EU level

EPIA

EREF

EWEA

EURELECTRIC4

Table A1 Acronyms and abbreviations

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Ydersbond, I. Multilevel ‘venue shopping’: The case of EU’s Renewables Directive. Int Groups Adv 3, 30–58 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/iga.2013.12

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