ABSTRACT

In the emerging debate on ‘harder soft governance,’ the relationship between hard and soft elements has not been fully explored. This paper addresses this gap by looking at the changing nature of policy monitoring, a quintessentially soft governance mechanism. It focuses on climate change, a dynamic site of policy expansion and experimentation in which the EU has historically been an international frontrunner. This paper finds that a range of ‘harder’ elements have been added to the EU's climate policy monitoring over time, including more explicit legal provisions, greater external publicity, and more concrete links to other policy processes. These changes have emerged from politically sensitive negotiations between many actors, principally the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Environment Agency (who together have generally favoured greater hardening), and Member States (some of whom preferred softer governance) in the context of changing international opportunities and constraints. Moving forward, this paper highlights the need for more research on the efficacy of policy monitoring, especially with respect to the EU's significantly more ambitious long-term decarbonisation targets.

摘要

在有关“更严格的软治理”的新兴辩论中，尚未完全探讨硬要素与软要素之间的关系。本文通过研究政策监控的本质变化来解决这一差距，这是一种典型的软治理机制。它侧重于气候变化，这是一个动态的政策扩展和试验场所，欧盟在历史上一直是国际领先者。本文发现，随着时间的推移，欧盟的气候政策监控中增加了一系列“更难”的要素，包括更明确的法律规定，更大的外部宣传以及与其他政策流程的更具体联系。这些变化源于许多参与者（主要是欧盟委员会）之间在政治上敏感的谈判，在不断变化的国际机遇和制约因素的背景下，欧洲议会和欧洲环境署（它们总体上都赞成加大力度）和成员国（其中一些成员国更喜欢软化治理）。展望未来，本文强调需要对政策监控的有效性进行更多研究，尤其是在欧盟远大得多的长期脱碳目标方面。