Lobbying and Litigation for Legislative Reform – Corporate Multi-Venue Advocacy in EU Climate Policy

The EU’s institutional framework offers a multi-venue landscape for interest representation, covering the executive, legislature, and judiciary, and with this contribution, I aim to offer a comprehensive approach to interest representation, rather than a singular focus on (political) lobbying strategies. In practice, interest groups strategically shop across advocacy venues and most even regard themselves as ‘multi-venue’ players, optimizing their chances at success throughout the policy cycle. While the strategic use of litigation as a political advocacy tool is irrefutable, the interplay between lobbying and litigation, or the notion of an integrated interest representation toolbox has received little scholarly attention to date. Mainstream EU scholarship, be it interest group politics or legal mobilization/judicial integration, tends to focus predominantly on one of these advocacy venues and among the limited number of EU interest group scholars analyzing litigation and the courts as part and parcel of interest politics, no consensus exists as to where strategies of legal (or judicial) interest representation are situated in the broader interest representation “toolkit”. To help bridge this gap, the paper aims to unveil the multi-venue advocacy landscape in the field of climate lawmaking, particularly lobbying and litigation strategies by corporate interests targeting the formulation of the EU Emissions Trading System. The paper seeks to ascertain how, and in which patterns, this type of multi-venue advocacy of corporate interests combining legal and political methods in pursuit of legal reform occurs at EU-level. To do so, I firstly conceptualize ‘multi-venue advocacy’ in the EU from the vantage point of the interplay between lobbying and litigation across the political and judicial advocacy venue, by bridging scholarly views on interest politics and legal mobilization. Secondly, the paper explores this practice empirically in a qualitative case study on corporate climate lobbying and litigation targeting the EU Emissions Trading System. The EU climate policy domain is particularly well-positioned for the paper’s purpose given its salience on the EU policy-making agenda, the high intensity of corporate lobbying efforts, and global rise of strategic climate litigation. While the paper aims to contribute to a fundamental re-thinking of what ‘lobbying’ practice entails in the multi-venue and multi-level governance context of the EU, the article also feeds into the study on the growing practice of strategic climate litigation in the EU. It does so through the acknowledgment of the judiciary’s place within a broader strategic framework, and its analysis of the patterns in which corporate interests strategically approach the judiciary, the executive, and legislature as (multi-)venues of interest representation.