The European Green Deal and its implementing instruments: Towards a new policy paradigm?

In order to enact the European Green Deal (EGD) commitment to simultaneously address the social and ecological challenges of decarbonisation, the European Commission has brought forward a broad legislative agenda covering a comprehensive range of sectors. Beyond introducing specific policy reforms, the EGD has pledged to use climate change as an opportunity to transform the very foundations of economy and society thus leading to a new model. Yet, no consensus exists on whether the way in which policy narratives and ideas unfolding around the EGD denote a paradigmatic shift or if they develop along the lines of the already consolidated ecological modernisation approach. This paper addresses the above puzzle, focusing specifically on the role of the European Commission in shaping the current policy agenda. By deploying a range of qualitative and textual analysis techniques with the so-called "bag of words" approach, particularly in the field of topics modelling and text clustering, we investigate a whole set of the European Commission’s communications implementing the EGD consisting in 65 texts as of July 2023, with a two-fold objective. First, the analysis aims at capturing the essential normative foundations and the balance between social, ecological and economic goals of the EU agenda for just transition. Second, it disentangles the differences between the political and legal dimensions therein by comparing the content of legislative documents and the discourses of the Chief Commission’s representatives to spell out possible mismatches in the definition of policy priorities and goals.