Sustainabilising Europe in times of crisis? The meta-policy role of the European Green Deal in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the negotiations on the EUs Multiannual Financial Framework

In 2019, just before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the European Commission presented the European Green Deal (EGD) as the EU's new sustainability-oriented growth strategy. Its ambition is to transform the EU into a just and prosperous society with a resource-efficient and competitive economy that is carbon neutral by 2050. While experience shows that sustainability ambitions are often weakened in times of crisis, this was not the case with the EGD. On the contrary, the EGD remained on the policy agenda and became an important basis of crisis recovery policy in the negotiations on the EU's Multiannual Financial Framework. From the perspective of discursive institutionalism, the article explains this through a combination of institutional and political conditions and the sustainability-oriented ideational underpinning of EGD. As an extensive, integrative, transformative, inclusive and reflexive meta-policy, the EGD proved to be a particularly well-suited framework for navigating the turbulence of the pandemic.