Today, the LIFE Plan4Climate project is launching a new briefing on the upcoming revision of the EU Governance Regulation — the legislative backbone that sets the common rules for how Member States plan, report and deliver on their climate and energy commitments. This revision will determine how the post-2030 EU energy and climate framework and the next generation of National Energy and Climate Plans, or NECPs, will look like.
This briefing looks at how it should be done — and how to make NECPs, and the governance around them, genuinely future-proof. It offers technical feedback on the policy options now under consideration, organised around the seven intervention areas set out in the Commission’s impact assessment. Its analysis is grounded in the experience of national experts who have monitored the NECPs process since the first plans were drafted in 2019, with feedback collected across 13 EU Member States — assessing each option not in the abstract, but against how plans are actually built and implemented.
The briefing’s technical feedback revolves around three main principles.
First, the revision must preserve binding targets. In particular, the existing energy architecture of binding EU and national targets for renewables and energy efficiency has demonstrably delivered results — and there is no evidence justifying its weakening. These targets cannot be collapsed into a single technology-neutral goal that could be met on paper while renewables and energy savings stall. Binding targets – with clear, credible trajectories to achieve them – give NECPs their direction and their credibility as a signal to public and private investors. They are the foundation the rest of the framework must build on, not an excess to be cut.
Second, streamlining must not mean deregulation. Streamlining the planning and reporting around NECPs — and making the plans more investable through granular, quantified data — can be a genuine improvement: a shared digital platform and common indicators could cut duplication and direct investment where it is needed. But streamlining must never be exchanged for deregulation: while there are margins for improving planning and reporting in a way that reduces administrative burden and makes the plans more implementation-focused, streamlining must not be a pretext for stripping back the obligations that make plans meaningful. The opposite – stronger compliance and enforcement – is needed: credibility, ultimately, depends on legislation that has teeth.
Third, the revision should reinforce, not dilute, public participation and multilevel governance. Past cycles saw consultations run too late and too briefly, after key decisions were already made. Future-proof governance means embedding meaningful participation at every stage: strengthening the relevant provisions, making Multilevel Climate and Energy Dialogues permanent and effective, and guaranteeing the access-to-information and access-to-justice rights enshrined in the Aarhus Convention. Genuine public ownership and the involvement of all relevant stakeholders are what makes plans more ambitious, credible and durable.