Suchergebnisse

The European Union (EU) has long discursively positioned itself as a global frontrunner for sustainability and climate protection. Nevertheless, substantive progress toward sustainability goals has not been reached in several governance areas, such as transport and mobility. Especially at the local scale, the highly complex and technocratic EU policy framework is confronted with increasingly polarized claim-making regarding ecological, social and economic problems. With its recent Green Deal governance architecture, the European Commission has sought to address this ideational and institutional fragmentation and resulting stalemate toward reaching "climate neutrality" by proposing ambitious sectoral policies and new governance instruments. This problem-driven paper exploratively investigates the ongoing reconfigurations the Green Deal induces within EU governance. Using the example of the urban mobility sector and employing an interpretive analysis of key policy documents and expert/stakeholder interviews, the paper links the literatures on EU governance architectures and norm dynamics. It discusses potentials and pitfalls for meaning-making processes in times of the socioecological polycrisis. Notably, it critically evaluates the Green Deal's capacity to open and sustain spaces for translating sustainability across horizontally and vertically fragmented realms of EU governance.

AbstractHistorically, crises have been lauded for fostering European Union (EU) integration. Conversely, it has recently been predicted that the current 'polycrisis' will precipitate the EU's demise. However, this dichotomous perspective on crises is oversimplified. In this research note, we argue that a critical‐constructivist approach to norm contestation is uniquely placed to illuminate the shades of grey populating the continuum between these two extremes. As contestation effects may occur on both normative and institutional levels, a norm contestation approach has the potential to open the black box of crises by investigating the prerequisites, actors and processes of crisis and reminding us that these stages are linked in a circular way. Therefore, we argue that a conversation between EU studies and critical‐constructivist norm contestation research is crucial to advancing our understanding of the myriad effects crises have on the EU beyond the dichotomous distinction between integration and demise.

AbstractThis article argues that the COVID‐19 pandemic has incited the collision of norms in sectoral European Union (EU) governance and provided an open juncture for the European Commission to engage in norm reconfiguration. Herewith, the paper expands the conceptual scope of EU‐related norm research, which by focussing on the diffusion of norms within and beyond the EU has largely omitted dynamic perspectives on norms so far. We combine International Relations norm research with EU governance literature to scrutinise the normative underpinnings of the immediate crisis response within Commission sectoral strategies and working programs. Empirically, the paper focuses on the higher education and transport sectors, which have been particularly impacted by the COVID‐19 crisis and targeted by the EU crisis response. The interpretative‐qualitative analysis uncovers COVID‐19‐related collisions within the ideational constellation of EU governance and shows that the European Commission has engaged in different reconfiguration practices, potentially altering the norm constellation in the investigated sectoral governance areas.

AbstractEU environmental policies such as the Ambient Air Quality Directive 2008/50 are highly relevant in this age of the looming climate crisis and interconnected sustainable transitions. However, implementation efforts such as low-emission zones, road pricing, and driving bans affect citizens in heterogenous situations and in ways that evoke questions of socioecological justice. This has resulted in an increasingly polarized reluctance to respective governance across Europe. The EU policy implementation literature often omits these less clearly operationalized norms that EU policies transport and pays little attention to how stakeholders in cities discursively and practically translate EU directives. Constructivist norm research underlines the importance of 'localizing' by highlighting that justice does matter for norm translation. The environmental justice concept has, however, not been systematically introduced and referenced in the norm research literature. This article offers a heuristic to address this research gap by combining a translation perspective from International Relations norm research with an environmental justice lens. Following the journey of the Air Quality Directive 2008/50, we ask how urban implementation configures the Directive's environmental justice dimension and why this is important for effective and sustainable EU governance. Empirically, we focus on action plans and participation processes regarding Directive 2008/50 in Brussels, Glasgow, and Hamburg. As a result, we show that EU environmental governance unfolds at the local level as a dynamic contestation of different distributive justice claims that then translate into concrete policies. The analysis indicates that those policies must procedurally integrate local knowledge and identity formation to enable comprehensively just sustainable transformations.

Die Krisenphänomene der letzten Jahre sind durch Überlappungen, Gleichzeitigkeiten, normative Mehrdeutigkeiten und unklare Bearbeitungsperspektiven geprägt. Solche multiplen Krisen sind auch immer normative Krisen, weil sie sich durch eine Pluralisierung normativer Ansprüche und den Streit über deren Geltung auszeichnen. Die Normenforschung kann auf gesellschaftliche Erwartungen nach erklärender Analyse, kritischem Verständnis und wissenschaftlich begleiteter Problembearbeitung von solchen Krisen reagieren. Wir argumentieren in dieser Einleitung zum Forum, dass insbesondere ein Blick auf die Dynamiken von Normen, Normbeziehungen und normativen Ordnungen konzeptionelle Möglichkeiten zur Untersuchung multipler Krisen bieten. Wie wir anhand von empirischen Beispielen des aktuellen Krisengeschehens zeigen, kann die Normenforschung die Komplexitäten und Widersprüche multipler Krisen analytisch greifen und kritisch diskutieren. Dabei erweisen sich insbesondere die Normativität, Relationalität und Situiertheit der Normenforschung als Stärken, um das gesellschaftliche Wissen über Krisenphänomene zu erweitern.

Reflexivity matters! - sowohl bezogen auf die eigene Person als Wissenschaftler*in wie auch auf die wissenschaftstheoretischen Grundannahmen. Reflexivität stellt eine Grundlage für gelingende Kommunikation in Forschungsfeldern dar, ist in der IB-Normenforschung allerdings noch nicht Status Quo. Das verwundert aus zwei Gründen: Erstens ist das Problem der doppelten Hermeneutik hier besonders relevant und zweitens schlägt sich gerade in der inhärenten Normativität des Forschungsfeldes die spezifische Situiertheit von Forschenden folgenreich nieder. Vor diesem Hintergrund argumentiert dieser Forumsbeitrag für das Sicht- und Nachvollziehbarmachen der Ausgangspunkte und Herangehensweisen von Normenforscher*innen. Um eine systematische Auseinandersetzung mit den Auswirkungen der eigenen Vorannahmen auf den Forschungsprozess zu erleichtern, präsentieren wir ein Fragenraster, welches auf der dreiteiligen Heuristik von autobiografischer Situiertheit, in-field Situiertheit und Situiertheit im Text basiert. Aus der Kombination dieser Heuristik mit den analytischen Dimensionen Person der*des Wissenschaftler*in und wissenschaftstheoretisches Verständnis ergeben sich Fragen, die die Reflexion der eigenen Forschung und die Kommunikation in der IB-Normenforschung erleichtern und bereichern.