The Development and Utilization of Scenarios in European Union Energy Policy

Scenarios are a strategic planning tool, which essentially enables decision-makers to identify future uncertainties and to devise or adjust organizational strategies. Increasingly, scenario building has been applied as a planning instrument by public policymakers. At the European Union (EU) level, scenarios are widely used in various policy areas and for different purposes. However, the development and utilization of scenarios in policymaking as well as their concrete impact on the decision process remain an under-explored research field. The academic literature focuses on scenarios in the business domain, where they are a well-established strategic planning component. In public policy, however, the development and use of scenarios conceivably differ from the private sector. In the case of the EU, the potential impact of its distinctive multi-stakeholder and multi-level policymaking environment on the development of scenarios is not sufficiently accounted for in the literature. Moreover, it is uncertain how scenarios are situated in the wider EU political context.
This thesis seeks to explain how scenarios are developed and utilized in the EU’s policymaking process. To that end, an institutionalized scenario development exercise from the Union’s energy policy (the Ten-Year Network Development Plan, TYNDP) is investigated as a case study. Drawing from empirical evidence primarily based on elite interviews, the research applies a qualitative-interpretative research framework that combines the analytical concepts of policy networks, epistemic communities, and strategic constructivism. The combination facilitates the design of a theoretical model of inner and outer spheres in EU energy policymaking, accounting for both the role of scenarios in policymaking and the impact of political goals on their development.
The research concludes that the wider EU political context of the outer sphere shapes the development of scenarios in the inner sphere and determines how they are utilized in the policymaking process. The expectations of political actors frame the technical expertise in the scenario development process. With regard to the application of scenarios in wider public policy, the research demonstrates that the closer the scenario building is to the decision-making process, the stronger the political impact on the scenarios is likely to be. This is because political actors and decision-makers seek to align the scenario outcomes to their respective preferences.