'The European Green Juridification. Making and Reassembling Ecological and Energy Networks'

A European green juridification (EGJ) is underway – an expanding and densifying body of legal material converge on the objective of achieving climate neutrality. The juridification paradigm captures the co-constructive interaction between ‘legal’ and ‘social’ dimensions, a concept Habermas famously employed to retrace Europe’s juridico-political modern history, culminating with the establishment of national welfare states. The European integration signals both a rupture and a retreat from this linear progression, through a partial erosion of welfare-based national legal systems. Yet, the EGJ revives certain legal instruments, such as planning and funding, originally rooted in this domestic tradition and revoking a welfarist ethos. Nevertheless, its general trajectory remains uncertain and subject to entangled tensions, thus posing a problem of method – how do we get to know it? To address the methodological challenge, this work revisits the constructivist foundation of juridification by integrating insights from the recent social theories engaged with the epistemological debate on ‘nature’. It critiques the traditional sociological approach to juridification, which relies on abstract, general, and rigidly defined epistemic categories of ‘social’ and ‘legal’, breaking from their complexly entangled and interdependent living dimensions. Instead, this research seeks to reassemble the ‘social’ and ‘legal’ dimensions within their complex networks of associations. By examining the evolutions of the ecological and energy networks at the heart of EGJ, this fine-grained analysis juxtaposes the study of legal constructionism, as rooted in integration studies, with the reassembling of the interlegal space – spanning both supranational and international levels – wherein their legal actors operate. Through the reassembling process, this work aims to ‘make visible’ the material, social and legal ties along which agencies locate and distribute, shaping together the heralded European climate-neutral society.