Contested Transitions: Policy Instruments as Sites of Conflict in Europe’s Green Transition

The European Green Deal (EGD) represents the EU’s central strategy for achieving climate neutrality by 2050. It has sparked broad scholarly interest, particularly regarding its governance innovations, discursive framing, and eco-social implications. While Europe’s green agenda has proven resilient in times of crisis, questions remain about its transformative potential. In this introduction, we set the stage for the Symposium Europe’s Green Transition – Policy Instruments and their Politicization by shifting focus from high-level ambitions to the contested politics of implementation. We explore key dimensions of political contestation within the EU’s ecological transition and argue that policy instruments are crucial yet underexplored sites of conflict in Europe’s green transition. As the contributions to this Symposium illustrate, the politics of policy instrument choice offer a valuable analytical lens for understanding why ecological change often unfolds incrementally and how it is shaped and limited by structural, institutional, and discursive constraints.