The role of technological neutrality in EU climate policymaking

Policy Study

The principle of technological neutrality holds that regulation should neither mandate nor discriminate against specific technologies, allowing markets to determine outcomes. It constitutes a key guiding principle in EU policymaking. While it is often presented as a clear and objective principle for EU policymaking, its meaning and effectiveness remain ambiguous.

The study critically analyses existing literature and concrete EU policy cases to assess the relevance and effectiveness of the principle in the context of decarbonisation and its uses by different stakeholders in current policy debates.

The study demonstrates that technological neutrality is inadequate to guide and support the complex, systemic transformations required for decarbonising our societies and that it tends to favour established technologies and interests and discriminate against innovations. It further demonstrates that technological neutrality is often not used as an ex-ante design principle for policies and regulations. It is deployed as a reactive communication strategy by incumbent interests once these understand how the regulation will impact them, to resist policy interventions and protect their capital.

The study proposes pragmatic alternatives that are better suited to planning and organising fair large-scale societal transformations. They can allow to avoid the technological neutrality trap and design more effective climate policies: mission-oriented governance, conditional industrial policy, standards-led transition pathways and more.