Against All Odds: The Liberalisation of the European Natural Gas Market—A Multiple Streams Perspective

Abstract

This chapter addresses the questions of why it took until the late 1980s for the liberalisation of the energy markets to enter the institutional agenda and a decade more to be finally adopted. Given the head start energy matters and the idea of a common market had in today’s European Union, the long time it took for agenda shaping and policy decision regarding energy liberalisation was surprising. Taking the liberalisation of the natural gas market as an example, the policy process leading to the first out of three gas directives is analysed using a modified multiple streams framework, which covers agenda-setting and decision-making. The analysis reveals that the rise on the institutional agenda resulted from the Commission’s success in framing energy matters as competition issues. By documenting its uncompetitive state, a problem window opened. As a competition issue, the Commission had the power to formulate directives unilaterally based on Article 90 of the EEC Treaty instead of negotiating a Council directive. In order to avoid the resulting loss of influence, the member states became willing to negotiate. The Commission coupled the ripe problem and politics stream with the policy stream by adapting policy solutions from the United Kingdom. The negotiations of the resulting draft proposal were lengthy, mainly because of the member states’ ongoing resistance against the proposal and their attempts to minimize adjustment costs to European legislation. A spillover effect from the simultaneously negotiated electricity draft finally broke down the legitimacy barrier and led to an agreement on the gas directive.