Foreseeing like a company: Businesses and the emergence of ‘sustainable competitiveness’ at the European Commission’s Forward Studies Unit

In recent years, the European Union (EU) has massively invested in environmental policies. In this regard, its latest efforts aim at reconciling environmental sustainability and economic competitiveness: The Green Deal Industrial Plan, or the Commission’s Communication ‘Long-term competitiveness of the EU’ (2023), illustrate how it seeks to combine economic goals (competitiveness) and environmental objectives (sustainability). Through a political sociology of the actors who have first put forward such hybrid concepts as ‘environmental’ or ‘sustainable competitiveness’, this paper will trace the socio-political genesis of this peculiar framing of environmental issues. The main hypothesis it would like to explore is that, at the turn of the 1990s, solidified around the European Commission a weak field of experts in prospective methods, which resulted in a new way of constructing environmental issues through the notion of ‘environmental competitiveness’. Empirically, I will focus on a short but meaningful episode: The creation of the Forward Studies Unit (1989) at the European Commission under the leadership of Jacques Delors, and its early years of activity up to the White Paper "Growth, competitiveness, employment" (1993). At the time, the Unit competed with other actors – such as DG Environment – to frame how growing environmental concerns should be included in EU policies. To assert its authority, it contracted with private companies (in this case, the consulting agency McKinsey & Co) that mastered prospective methods. Eventually, this contributed to legitimizing new resources and a new way of thinking about environmental concerns that was not only largely done for businesses, but also co-produced by private companies. I rely on the archival funds of the European Commission and the Council from the late 1960s (Florence), the archives of the Forward Studies Unit (Brussels), the Jacques Delors’ papers (UCLouvain) and interviews.