POLICY CALIBRATION OF THE EUROPEAN GREEN DEAL IN THE CONTEXT OF THE ADOPTION OF CLEAN INDUSTRIAL DEAL
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17072/2218-1067-2026-2-143-157Keywords:
European Union, Green Deal, climate policy, industrial policy, critical discourse analysis, policy calibrationAbstract
A few years after the publication of the European Green Deal, the European Commission has presented a new development of "green" policy in the EU – the Clean Industrial Deal. At first glance, the strategic document of 2025 has an implementation character and relates to the «joint roadmap», as indicated in its title. However, the status and significance of the «Clean Industrial Deal» and the «Green Deal» are identical. Both documents are Communications from the European Commission, semantically referring to a strategic «Deal», and were published in the first months of the Presidency of Ursula Von der Leyen — in December 2019 and February 2025, respectively. This spurred debate on whether the Green Deal remains relevant, or the industrial production has become an alternative model. The objective of this article is to determine the nature of transformation of the European Green Deal through the lens of political change, applying the concept of policy calibration. Both the prerequisites for political calibration and specific instances of its use are examined. Theoretically and methodologically, this research is grounded in the corpus of scholarly literature on political processes and political change. This research is underpinned by critical discourse analysis as a methodological framework. The empirical data consists of the EU documents, speeches and statements by the EU representatives starting from 2025. As a result, three types of policy calibrations were identified: from "green" to "clean"; from model to business case; from international cooperation to international competition.
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