Climate Governance Ideas and Creative Learning: the Discursive Agency of the European Council

This paper examines climate governance ideas and the role of the European Council as a discursive agent contributing to institutional change in the polycrisis era. Specifically, we seek to understand the ideas which the heads of state and government have used to frame and re-frame the climate challenge in order to provide the political impetus for EU climate policy development, despite being confronted with successive crises. In doing so, we proceed in several steps. Firstly, we outline our theoretical framework, which draws on discursive institutionalism and creative policy learning to explain how the power of ideas communicated by discursive agents in the “problem space” can affect policy change in the “solution space.” Secondly, we conduct a comprehensive literature review to assess what ideas states and international organisations have used to frame the climate crisis in the past. Next, we conduct a discourse analysis on all European Council Conclusions published between 2007 and 2021, mapping the ideas that the institution has used to communicate the climate challenge to both internal and external audiences. Finally, we draw on semi-structured qualitative interviews to understand how the rise and fall of various ideas communicated by the European Council have contributed to climate policy developments, including the 2020 and 2030 Climate and Energy Policy Frameworks and the European Green Deal. We argue that the European Council has used ideas to frame and re-frame the climate crisis in order to maintain political focus on the issue and inspire the creative policy developments which the climate challenge calls for. Furthermore, the ideational mosaic employed by the institution is affected by different crises themselves, with the heads of state and government employing differing discourses to respond to the climate threat during the financial, migration, and COVID-19 crises.