Publications
Description
This report examines the contribution of climate litigation to democratic climate governance in the European Union (EU). Combining a systematic mapping of climate litigation before the courts of EU Member States and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) with an in-depth case study of Ireland, it analyses how litigation shapes accountability, participation, representation, deliberation, expertise, effectiveness and justice within climate governance. The findings show that climate litigation has become an established feature of EU climate governance. While high-profile cases have attracted considerable attention, most climate litigation does not ask courts to make climate policy. Instead, it asks them to determine whether governments are complying with the climate laws and commitments they have already adopted and, where necessary, to require their implementation. Courts generally exercise restraint, ensuring that governments comply with statutory, constitutional and administrative requirements while leaving policy choices to democratically elected institutions. The report finds that the principal contribution of climate litigation in the EU lies beyond the outcomes of individual cases. The prospect of judicial scrutiny encourages public authorities to improve climate planning, strengthen administrative decision-making, and better integrate scientific evidence and legal analysis into policy processes. Litigation therefore promotes institutional learning, transparency and the rule of law, while enhancing accountability and creating opportunities for participation by individuals and civil society organisations. At the same time, the report identifies persistent challenges, including barriers to access to justice, unequal legal resources and growing political resistance to judicial oversight. Overall, it concludes that climate litigation should be understood as a complementary component of democratic climate governance that reinforces accountability, supports effective implementation of climate law, and strengthens the resilience and legitimacy of democratic responses to climate change
Description
This report studies the role of non-legislative processes in EU climate change policymaking from the first von der Leyen Commission through to September 2025. We analyse processes whereby the European Commission is given the mandate to amend basic legislation (through delegated and implementing acts), and processes in which the Council of the European Union acts as the sole institution able to amend Commission proposals (emergency procedure under TFEU Article 122). We study how these processes contribute to policymaking efficiency and any potential trade-offs for democracy. Our empirical analysis consists of a database of all non-legislative processes pertaining to climate policy since 2020 initiated by DG CLIMA, DG ENER, and other relevant DGs, complemented by 10 semi-structured interviews conducted with policymakers working at the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the permanent representations of EU member states. We find that non-legislative processes have been used more frequently over time, and are a rapid means to update or clarify policy: implementing act processes are completed quickly, with delegated act processes taking somewhat longer. However, non-legislative processes tend to sideline or only partially reflect certain key features of democratic governance systems: including representation, accountability, participation, and knowledge. Our results highlight an important tension in EU climate policymaking between the need for efficient policymaking and democratic decision-making—in other words, between rapid emissions reductions and policymaking procedures that are inclusive, fair and just. More research is required to study this tension, and to draw attention to it, particularly in a constrained political context in which climate action is a lower priority, especially following the results of the 2024 European elections.
Description
This report, produced under Work Package 4 of the RETOOL project, examines the contribution of independent climate advisory bodies to democratic climate governance. Over 40 countries have established such bodies, yet existing research skews toward the UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC). It emphasises positive impact on climate policymaking but does not address the impact on broader democratic governance and does not consider how these bodies withstand growing political contestation around climate action across Europe. The report addresses these gaps in two ways. First, applying the RETOOL analytical framework, it evaluates the impact of Ireland’s Climate Change Advisory Council (CCAC) across the pillars of climate democracy.
Second, it examines how advisory bodies are impacted by and respond to rising contestation—externally, through UK CCC mentions in parliamentary debate, and internally, through interviews with policy stakeholders in Ireland, Finland and Sweden and the Irish CCAC, the Finnish Climate Change Panel, and the Swedish Climate Policy Council. Findings show that the advisory bodies considered in the study contribute most strongly to the effectiveness and accountability pillars of climate democracy, while their contribution to participation and deliberativeness remains limited, except for the UK CCC, largely due to mandate and resourcing constraints rather than any inherent limitation of the model. Under political contestation, institutional resilience depends less on public standing of the body than on statutory embeddedness, parliamentary engagement, and anchoring to legal commitments such as EU targets. A statutory “duty to respond” requiring governments to consider and respond to advice matters for impact but is not sufficient alone. The report concludes with recommendations on legal embeddedness, mandate and accountability provisions, funding arrangements and strategies for the bodies to increase resilience.
Description
The COVID-19 pandemic was a crisis of far-reaching societal, economic, and political impacts. Responses to the pandemic were no less far-reaching. This report presents a systematic literature review of 150 peerrevpeer-reviewediewed articles on how European democracies responded to the COVID-19 crisis with the aim of drawing out useful learnings for climate democracy. In this review, we thus build upon the RETOOL analytical framework to distill lessons about the effectiveness and democratic quality of governance responses to the pandemic in Europe, and what these experiences teach us for future crises – notably the climate crisis. Key lessons show that robust democratic institutions, anchored in legal safeguards against executive overreach and sustained by cultures of consensus, pluralism and tolerance, are crucial to withstand crises. This is a relatively rare combination however, and one that cannot be guaranteed during times of crisis. This points to a need for new participatory forums to bolster existing democratic institutions. The review also looks at issues of justice, since democratic governance should produce just decisions and this is a key issue in climate democracy discussions. The reviewed literature sees justice dimensions as deeply intertwined: threats to recognitional justice often coincide with distributive and procedural injustices, again pointing to a need for more meaningful and inclusive participation. Finally, the COVID-19 pandemic is also read as a critical juncture, exposing institutional weaknesses while also opening space for democratic innovation. However, most studies focus on resilience over renewal, and justice aspects are rarely addressed explicitly. Future research should clarify the meaning of democracy and what democratic innovation, especially concerning non-majoritarian, deliberative, and prefigurative democratic movements, and examine how diverse justice dimensions can be integrated into emergency governance.
Description
Over the past two decades, public involvement in environmental and climate-related regulatory decisions has expanded across Europe and beyond. These initiatives have highlighted citizens' rights to information about environmental and health risks while underscoring the democratic imperative of participatory decision-making. Moreover, environmental movements, NGOs, and activists have urged a redefinition of democratic processes.
This paper argues that such phenomena emerged as consequences of environmental activism from the 1970s and 1980s. Through analysis of social mobilizations following the Seveso disaster (Italy), the Gorleben nuclear facility controversy (Germany), and the Żarnowiec nuclear plant dispute (Poland), we trace the emergence and evolution of some specific environmental movements, examining their techniques, repertoires, democratic practices, and political demands. Despite their differences, these controversies and the following mobilization introduced environmental concerns into decision-making processes at local, national, and European levels.
More significantly, they challenged the structural limitations of governments in managing risk. Confronted with opaque decision-making, technocratic delegation of power, and lack of transparency, environmental movements demanded more participatory governance forms. These movements advocated for including affected communities and citizens in public deliberation, enabling them to raise scientific and moral questions, express autonomous assessments, and help define political priorities. This democratic transformation was largely an unintended consequence of 1970s-1980s environmental mobilization. What began with minimal ambitions – introducing environmental controls and addressing environmental crises – produced results exceeding activists' expectations: renewed political participation, grassroots knowledge production, and alternative participatory democratic models. Nevertheless, these ambitious outcomes were only partially achieved. While national and European institutions received many specific environmental protection and governance requests, citizens' and movements' involvement in decisionmaking processes, along with their proposals for transforming European democracies, remained marginalized.
Description
Public participation and deliberation can play a key role in the creation of more effective, legitimate, and socially acceptable climate policy. In this report, we map and assess the EU’s landscape for participation and deliberation related to climate change. Our analysis focuses on 15 key participatory and deliberative mechanisms at the EU and national levels. Drawing on the academic literature, human rights law, and the 1998 Aarhus Convention, we analyse these mechanisms along nine key dimensions: the governance level where they operate (EU and/or Member States), how they are initiated (top-down or bottom-up), which stage of the policy cycle they address (agenda setting, decision-making, evaluation), who can participate (citizens, other stakeholders), the mode of participation (input, discussion, deliberation), the level of transparency, the accountability of decision-makers, the impact of participation on decision-making, and the legal institutionalisation of the mechanisms. We find that the EU is home to a wide array of participatory and deliberative mechanisms for climate governance, but that the uneven quality of these mechanisms leaves significant room for improvement. Five key challenges are identified: imbalanced representation, implementation gaps, limited impact and transparency, low public visibility, and a lack of deliberation in Member States and across governance levels. To address these challenges, we propose an agenda for action, including setting robust EU-wide participation standards, fostering national deliberative mechanisms, empowering civil society participation, mainstreaming participation in national climate governance, improving existing EU mechanisms, increasing public awareness, and encouraging wider debate on participation and deliberation.
Description
Well-designed public participation plays a crucial role in creating effective, widely accepted climate governance. In this report, we analyse the quality of public participation carried out during the formulation of the EU National Energy and Climate Plans (NECP) and National Long-term Strategies (LTS). First, we analyse the consultations carried out related to 106 NECPs and 26 LTSs according to 4 dimensions of participation quality: inclusiveness, deliberative quality, policy impact, and transparency. Our analysis shows large variations in the participatory quality of consultations across Member States and over time. Only a few Member States reach the levels of absolute quality, relative quality, and consistency over time necessary to be close to the standard for high-quality participation. Second, we carry out case studies of consultation practices in four Member States: Germany, France, Sweden, and Slovenia. We focus special attention on the role that the institutionalisation of participatory practices, institutions, and discourses plays in these consultation practices. We find that the NECPs are often not treated as a high priority in climate policy making and that consultation practices within each case differ over time. In three of the cases (Germany, France and Sweden) we find evidence of substitutive institutionalisation, where existing participatory institutions stand in for NECP requirements with little or no new NECP-specific institutionalisation. Only in Slovenia, which possessed less existing participatory infrastructure when the NECP/LTS process began in 2018, do we find evidence for substantive institutionalisation: the creation of practices, institutions, and discourses that are specifically focused on the NECPs. We contribute to the existing literature by designing and utilising a novel assessment framework for participation quality, further developing the conceptual approach to the study of institutionalisation in participatory processes, and significantly expanding the empirical scope of analysis in this area.
Description
This report examines how national parliaments across the European Union have responded to climate governance challenges through institutional innovation. Drawing on comparative mapping of all EU member states and three detailed case studies, we identify four categories of parliamentary climate innovations: commitment mechanisms (e.g., framework laws, emission budgets, sectoral targets) that bind future governments; oversight innovations (e.g.,post-legislative scrutiny, climate accountability provisions) that enhance monitoring capacity; information innovations (e.g., climate advisory councils, parliamentary research services) that reduce information asymmetries; and participatory innovations (e.g., e-petitions, digital platforms, deliberative mini-publics) that expand citizen engagement beyond elections. The comparative analysis is complemented by three case studies. Austria illustrates how parliamentary budget offices can evolve into climate-competent fiscal watchdogs, embedding environmental considerations into the budget cycle. The example of the Estonian Riikikogu shows how digital participation platforms can broaden public agenda-setting and institutionalise citizen voice in parliamentary procedure. The example of parliamentary accountability mechanisms introduced under Ireland’s 2021 Climate Act amendments highlight the limits and potential of accountability reforms embedded in climate framework legislation, particularly the tension between policy ambition and implementation capacity. Together, the findings underline that parliamentary climate innovation is uneven across member states, that they are reliant on political will, but also that parliaments are becoming pivotal sites of democratic adaptation to climate transitions. Across all three cases, we show that formal institutional design matters less than sustained political commitment and thoughtful integration into existing parliamentary processes and practices. However, we stress that parliamentary climate innovation remains uneven across member states and reliant on political will, but that despite this, parliaments are becoming pivotal sites of democratic adaptation to climate transitions.
Description
Knowledge, expertise, and policy advice play a key role in European Union climate policymaking due to the regulatory nature of EU law and the multifaceted challenges posed by climate change. In this report, we seek to map the EU organisational landscape for knowledge provision and policy advice related to climate change. We examine the EU knowledge regime, the broad system of organisations, processes, and actors that generates policy-oriented research, data, ideas, and policy advice. Within this wider knowledge regime, we pay particular attention to the policy advisory system (PAS), the sub-system of the knowledge regime that focuses on generating policy-relevant advice. Drawing on documentary analysis and interviews, we outline the main features of the climate‑related knowledge regime surrounding the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the Council of the European Union. We also examine cross-cutting organisations oriented toward multiple EU institutions (e.g., the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change). We find a complex, evolving regime with complicated patterns of advice creation and use. We then examine the European Commission’s use of expertise in the legislative proposals and impact assessments related to the revision of the Emissions Trading System (ETS) Directive as part of the Fit-for-55 package and the setting of the EU’s greenhouse gas reduction target for 2040. Our analysis finds a strong focus on internal citations to Commission research and the Joint Research Centre. Documents related to the 2040 target also draw on knowledge from external EU bodies (European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, European Environment Agency) and international organisations (the IPCC, the International Energy Agency) to a much greater extent than the ETS impact assessment.
Description
This report studies the impact of deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) on climate action and democratic governance. It presents a novel analytical framework for understanding impact, which integrates components of the RETOOL Analytical Framework (Brawley-Cheshworth et al., 2025) and the Knowledge Network on Climate Assemblies (KNOCA) Impact Evaluation Framework (Demski et al., 2024). This framework is used to carry out a systematic review of 121 articles on climate change and energy transition focused DMPs, which highlights gaps in research on the impact of DMPs on justice and accountability, as well on the impact of DMPs on expertise/ resources and thinking. The framework is also used to guide case studies of DMPs in Belgium, Sweden, and Ireland. These case studies were chosen to allow for exploration of a range of national contexts and innovations in DMP practice and are informed by semi-structured interviews and primary analysis of DMP recommendations. They explore not only the impact of the DMPs, but also the extent to which the DMPs were institutionalised or embedded into national climate governance and contributed to governance innovation. Takeaways for academics and policymakers on how to understand and enhance the impact of DMPs are presented in the final section. They emphasise the need for strong political coupling and commitment, effective and innovative communication, and careful consideration of the purpose of DMPs within democratic climate governance.
Description
This report examines the impacts of deliberative mini-publics on climate action and democratic governance in Estonia and Poland. Using a framework combining the seven characteristics of climate democracy from the RETOOL analytical framework with the impact types from the KNOCA Impact Evaluation Framework, the study draws on desk review, RETOOL workshops, and 26 semi-structured interviews across both countries. In Estonia, the report examines the Tartu and Tallinn climate assemblies and the national Opinion Journey (Arvamusrännak) dialogue. In Poland, it focuses on the Narada Obywatelska o Kosztach Energii (Civic Council on Energy Costs), the first national citizens’ assembly and the first organised by an NGO rather than government. The most consistent finding across both cases is that deliberative participation processes on energy and climate generate stronger conceptual and capacity impacts than instrumental ones. Locally commissioned processes showed stronger connections between deliberation and implementation, pointing to a structural tension: deliberation is most feasible at the local level, where political authority for systemic change is weakest, and could be most consequential at the national level, where deliberation is hardest to sustain. Both cases also reveal the importance of political will and highlight a gap in the accountability infrastructure surrounding deliberative processes. They also challenge a simplistic hypothesis of younger democracies being more fragile or more receptive to deliberative innovation. Instead, the legacy of authoritarianism and the post-1989 transition to democracy shape the conditions for deliberative climate governance.
Description
As the EU transitions into implementing its 2040 climate goals, deep socio-economic transformation requires public legitimacy rather than just legislation. To combat rising backlash and low institutional trust, Estonia and Poland experimented with climate assemblies to engage citizens in policy decisions. Research for the RETOOL project shows these assemblies achieved strong conceptual impacts—building expertise and shifting how citizens and decision-makers think about climate issues like energy poverty—but failed to deliver direct instrumental impact on policy. This lack of policy delivery threatens to further erode public trust, exposing a structural tension where deliberation is easiest at the local level where systemic authority is weakest. Ultimately, deliberative participation can only build lasting support for green policies if it is treated as a long-term investment in democracy and designed from the outset with clear political mandates and structured follow-up.
Description
Why public participation mattersMeaningful and high-quality public participation in climate policymaking promises a two-fold reward: it can strengthen democracy and increase public support for robust climate action. These outcomes are achieved through increased transparency, enhanced trust in democratic processes, heightened legitimacy of policy decisions and processes, and reduced political polarisation.As the EU advances its green transition policies, increasingly directly affecting citizens' daily lives, meaningful public participation is critical to ensure climate action that is effective, legitimate, fair and broadly supported by society.
The European Commission has highlighted the strengthening of public participation in EU decision-making as part of its strategic priority to improve overall democratic governance. To do so, the Commission is planning to enhance existing mechanisms and introduce new ones, including annual Youth Policy Dialogues and a Youth Advisory Board. In any case, public participation mechanisms should follow established good practices to ensure inclusive engagement of citizens and stakeholders, and to foster meaningful discussion and deliberation. Only high-quality public participation can maximise benefits for democracy and climate action and contribute meaningfully to the Commission's goals of simplification and effective implementation.
Description
National parliamentary debate on climate change has expanded dramatically from under 2% of statements in the early 2000s to over 10% by 2020. However, the tone, analytical depth, and institutional oversight capacity remain highly fragmented across Europe. To bridge this gap, parliaments are turning to democratic innovations across four distinct pillars: commitment mechanisms like framework laws and sectoral targets, extended oversight mechanisms, independent expert information channels, and direct citizen participatory pathways. Despite these innovations, structural implementation across EU member states remains deeply uneven. While eleven member states possess comprehensive climate framework laws, only five enforce sector-differentiated targets. Seven rely on total emission budgets, five integrate green-budgeting provisions into their core architecture, and eighteen maintain advisory bodies with widely diverging mandates and financial resources. Strengthening national climate governance requires a comprehensive approach across seven core priorities: connecting parliamentary climate innovations into a cohesive portfolio, converting long-term targets into traceable milestones, embedding climate scrutiny into routine legislative cycles, securing independent analytical expertise, establishing clear pathways for public input, aligning accountability directly with administrative authority, and leveraging inter-parliamentary networks for cross-border peer learning. Ultimately, these democratic innovations will only strengthen climate governance if they transition from extraordinary measures into the everyday, cross-party routine of parliamentary work.
Description
We carried out an in-depth analysis of the use of delegated and implementing acts in the EU over time, both in general and in climate policy, and reflected on their democratic role. Our analysis shows that while delegated and implementing acts are an efficient motor of EU climate policy development, they also contain deficiencies in terms of accountability, representation, knowledge, and participation. In this policy brief, we highlight our key findings and outline policy lessons to ensure that delegated and implementing acts do not pose risks to the democratic quality of EU climate policy.
Description
Following the EU leaders' retreat at the picturesque Alden Biesen Castle, Commission President von der Leyen outlined sweeping reforms to be delivered by 2027. The narrative is clear: EU policymakers need to act fast or the EU risks falling behind. Under this pressure, democratic safeguards are increasingly treated as obstacles rather than essentials. This misses the point: good governance is not an onerous liability but ensures high-quality policy decisions and maintains public trust. The Commission’s ongoing review of the Better Regulation Guidelines is the chance to prove that speed and democratic legitimacy are compatible, not competing objectives.