The Commission’s Strategies for Designing an Emissions Trading Scheme for the European Union

Abstract

This case study is the first of three that all aim to provide theory-ground ed, empirically rich contributions to an issue that has been haunting our discipline for decades: the role of knowledge in policy. The mechanisms of learning in a functionally differentiated Commission are addressed by identifying conditions under which learning takes place in different modes (politicized and technocratic). We argue that the organizational function of either mandate delivery or power maximization determines whether knowledge is used cognitively or instrumentally. The analysis of the policy-formulation process of the ETS — the EU’s market-based mechanism to reduce CO₂^l — will allow us to identify several strategies of knowledge utilization under these two different conditions.