From knowledge to (supranational) influence: a learning-oriented approach to EU policy-making

Scholarship on the European Union tends to agree on the fact that the European Commission’s influence is in decline, due both to its diminished control on agenda-setting and the increasing prominence of intergovernmental dynamics. Against this backdrop, this paper proposes a re-assessment of the role of the Commission in EU policy-making from a learning-informed perspective, looking at ‘who controls what is learnt’ in the EU policy process and, eventually, which policy-relevant knowledge and beliefs guide EU policies. Bridging knowledge utilisation and policy process literature, the paper adopts learning as a heuristic of EU policy-making in order to develop a causal explanation linking knowledge to supranational influence. It conceptualises the Commission as a sui generis knowledge broker that acts at the same time as a ’learner’ vis-à-vis its knowledge networks (e.g., expert and interest groups, EU agencies, administrative networks) and a ’teacher’ when interacting with other EU institutions. From this perspective, actors’ control over learning processes comes to be a critical variable to explain influence over policy outcomes. As to make a case for this theoretical argument, the paper discusses it in relation to recent developments in EU climate and energy policy, which can be regarded as a critical case of supranational influence in a loosely-integrated intergovernmental sector.