Impact Assessment and the Liberalization of the EU Energy Markets: Evidence‐Based Policy‐Making or Policy‐Based Evidence‐Making?

Abstract

The European Commission proposal on the liberalization of energy markets has been widely debated in policy, stakeholder and academic circles both for its content and the potential consequences for the structure of the EU gas and electricity markets. However, little has been said about the empirical evidence produced by the European Commission to support this legislative package. Since the Impact Assessment (IA) system has been in place, there have been concerns regarding quality and adequateness, especially when quantifying costs, benefits and risks, selecting policy options and considering stakeholder opinions. This article examines how these crucial issues were factored into the IA on the liberalization of EU energy markets. It is concluded that the selected policy option reflects the position of some stakeholders at the expense of the available evidence on its impacts on markets, society and the environment. Copyright (c) 2010 The Author(s). Journal compilation (c) 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The European Union and Policy Coherence for Development: Reforms, Results, Resistance

“…Thus, the primary attraction of IAs, which obviously have a strong rationalistic appeal, would be that of making governments and regulatory agencies rely more on evidence-based analysis and of making them more accountable (Radaelli and Meuwese, 2010). However, the execution of IAs has not met initial expectations: numerous concerns have been raised on their overall quality, particularly the quantification of costs and benefits of alternative proposals and the effective involvement of stakeholders (Kirkpatrick and Franz, 2007;Pollack and Hafner-Burton, 2010;Torriti, 2010). The IA procedure was originally seen by the European Commission as a 'a powerful mechanism' to further advance the promotion of PCD -and was further stressed by the 2009 revised guidelines, stating explicitly that more attention would have to be paid to assessing the impact of all EU policies on developing countries (European Commission, 2009a) -and corresponds to the political commitment expressed by the EU's Foreign Affairs Council, which called for an 'evidence-based and result-oriented approach to promoting PCD' (Council, 2012).…”

“…By outlining potential positive and negative effects of proposed policy actions, including synergies and trade-offs between competing objectives, IAs represent a tool for the exchange of technical information between interested parties (Bäcklund, 2009). At the same time, they may be used by consensus-seeking actors to de-politicise complex issues (Radaelli and Meuwese, 2010) or may represent the position of some stakeholders at the expense of others (Torriti, 2010). Despite comprising a highly fragmented setup, partly due to the expanding EU legislative competencies and partly as a result of the enlargement process, the European Commission argued that its 'Smart Regulation' agenda would be suitable for effectively promoting and pursuing all horizontal objectives that transcended particular sectors and areas, including PCD.…”

Evaluating energy efficiency policy: understanding the ‘energy policy epistemology’ may explain the lack of demand for randomised controlled trials

“…For clarity, these demands will be referred to from hereon as the 'energy policy epistemology' as the arguments made here are meant largely to focus on the particular demands of evaluating energy policy. The one proviso of such a deductive approach is that any such pattern may be subject to the risk aversion to negative findings identified by Vine et al and others, revealing what might be classified as a 'defensive epistemology'-that is undertaking 'policy-based evidence making' in the pejorative sense of the phrase (Torriti 2010). Clearly, on the basis of good democratic standards, any policy institution that subscribes to a 'defensive epistemology' is effectively attempting to bypass accountability to citizens and is therefore not a legitimate, defensible position.…”

The Risk of Residential Peak Electricity Demand: A Comparison of Five European Countries

“…The slow but inevitable liberalization of European energy markets over the last ten years has dissolved the traditional nation-state economic energy model. Although full market liberalization still presents heterogeneous features [2] and arguably has not been completely achieved [3], the three European Union packages on the liberalization of energy markets have marked the progress towards the highest level of integration of energy markets ever experienced in Europe [4]. The formal integration of energy markets is also marked by the creation of new institutions, like the Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators (ACER)-a Europe-wide supranational regulator which aims to support market integration, advise national energy regulators and monitor the progress of market co-operation.…”