The challenge of ratcheting up climate ambitions: Implementing the 'experimentalist' EU energy and climate governance regulation

The 2015 Paris climate Agreement established a 'bottom-up', pledge and review process as international climate governance's central framework. The European Union's governance framework - the Energy and Climate Governance Regulation (EUGR) - uses a similar architecture. Both require states to regularly create, revise and update national plans while ramping up ambitions towards meeting the collectively agreed commitments and sharing features of Experimentalist Governance. This paper contributes to the debate on experimentalist climate governance's effectiveness. It assesses systematically the implementation of EUGR based on documentary analysis and expert interviews. We find that the process has been partially effective in raising ambitions but has remained incremental, technocratic and depoliticised. Experimentalist processes such as the EUGR and Paris Agreement require a high level of public and stakeholder engagement to operate but politicisation can have, in turn, adverse effects. This raises questions regarding the ability of experimentalist climate governance to deliver, alone, rapid emission reductions.