Beyond Exceptional and Ordinary: Analysing the Effects of Emergency Frames on EU Renewable Energy Policy‐Making

Abstract This study aims to provide a better understanding of how policy‐making changes when an issue is framed as an emergency. Literature on emergency politics provides different views on policy‐making changes resulting from emergency frames, where ordinary and exceptional policy‐making overlap in different ways. This article therefore develops a four‐part framework conceptualising and operationalising the potential policy‐making changes resulting from emergency frames. It develops propositions of changes in the policy‐making process, its output and the governance of the policy issue. It subsequently probes the applicability of the conceptual framework, studying the reframing of renewable energy as a security issue after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. We argue that our conceptual framework helps to explain the varied effects of emergency frames on policy‐making and conditions underlying those effects. Our plausibility probe provides a basis for future research, which could compare other cases or study in depth the discursive component of emergency politics.