Why the EU and the Member States should bet on multilevel governance: Policy Brief

The Governance of the Energy Union and Climate Action mandates Member States to set up multilevel energy and climate dialogues. Most Member States are reporting on such activities only when they design or revise the National Energy and Climate Plans (NECPs). While only eleven out of 27 Member States have submitted a final revised version of these plans – due back in June 2024 – the NECPlatform project stresses the importance of strengthening multilevel governance when revising the Governance Regulation. This is essential to successfully transpose the Green Deal legislation into national law and implement NECPs.

Half-hearted implementation of multilevel climate and energy dialogues

Member states were required to submit to the European Commission a draft version of their revised NECP in June 2023 and a final one in June 2024. The European Commission’s assessments of the draft revised NECPs and their report on the NECPs’ implementation highlight that, although all Member states mention multilevel dialogues, the quality of these processes varies significantly. Few Member States have detailed how such dialogues have fed into their plans, and even fewer have set up long-term dialogue platforms.

This clearly shows that the framework established by the Governance Regulation is insufficient, as the core principles of Article 11 are not respected. We need to go further and showcase why such multilevel processes are essential to success.

A greater need for multilevel dialogues in the coming years

The Green Deal has focused a great deal of attention on the local and regional level, with new planning obligations, targets, as well as technical and financial support from Member States. Thus, to implement these policies, it will be all the more essential to have multilevel dialogues to:

• Ensure that the targets set at national level reflect reality, matching the observations coming from local and regional levels, as well as from businesses.
• Discuss the implementation of new objectives and plans imposed on local authorities and businesses, the obstacles that may arise, and share good practices.
•  Define the best and most efficient way to set up new financial and technical support mechanisms or improve existing ones, matching local authorities’ and businesses’ needs.
• Preparing the ground for the next NECPs or Long-Term Strategy for 2040 and 2050

The experience of the NECPlatform project, which sets up multilevel dialogues in 6 Member States confirms the relevance of such an approach. In Romania, the dialogues have led to a readjustment of the national objectives and are well on the way of removing obstacles to the creation of citizen energy communities. In Croatia, they have led to in-depth discussions on the effectiveness of financial aid programmes. The French regions have initiated regional COP processes to take ownership of and distribute national objectives.

Strengthening the Regulation on the Governance of the Energy Union and Climate Action

To this end the NECPlatform project encourages the new college of European Commissioners formed in autumn 2024 to:

• Revise parts of the Regulation on the Governance of the Energy Union and Climate Change to consolidate its multilevel dimension, following its review report as set in Article 45. In particular, we recommend reinforcing Article 11 by requesting Member States to work on the quality of the climate and energy dialogues and their role in the implementation of NECPs.

• Review the implementing Regulation 2022/2299 accordingly, providing an adequate template for Member States to report on the quality of the dialogues (a suggested modified Annex XXIII is in the Annex of this document).

• Include a mandatory chapter on the implementation of the NECPs where each Member State can clarify which players will be responsible for implementing the proposed measures and list the national and European financial and technical resources available to support them.
• Explore additional tools and processes to foster more multilevel governance in the implementation of the NECPs. 

Read the full Policy Brief here.