Heather Grabbe is a Visiting Professor at UCL’s European Institute and a Senior Fellow at Bruegel. Her research focuses on the political economy of the European Green Deal and how the climate transition will change EU external relations. She has previously worked as the Director of the Open Society European Policy Institute in Brussels, Deputy Director of the Centre for European Reform and senior advisor on the Balkans and Turkey to European Commissioner Olli Rehn.

This interview was conducted and written up by UCL students Keyla Carcausto Romero (MSc Economics and Policy of Energy and the Environment) and Maria Levina (BASc Arts and Sciences), both European Institute Student Ambassadors.

Looking back at your career, what has been most impactful in shaping how you view the EU?

Working across academia, think tanks, policy, the Commission, and a large foundation has given me really different vantage points on how the EU functions and what impact it has, both on the world and on citizens’ lives. From the inside, you start to appreciate why things work the way they do. From the outside, it is easy to assume that bolder or cleverer people could simply sort out the problems. I think it is genuinely helpful to hold both perspectives at once.

What conversation do you hope to bring to the UCL European Institute?

What I enjoy about this role is being able to connect Brussels with a dynamic academic community — both the experts and the students trying to engage with the EU so it can fulfil its mission better. The Institute’s cross-disciplinary reach is what makes that possible: it bring together political science, law, culture and society, and connects all of that with very technical questions around things like resource use and rule of law. I also work with other parts of UCL, including the Institute for Sustainable Resources, which connects closely with the circular economy agenda.

The European Green Deal started as a climate agenda but has become something much broader. How should we understand that shift?

The politics surrounding climate action have changed fundamentally in recent years, and this is inevitable in any large-scale structural transition. The tricky thing is that those who will be negatively affected by the energy transition, for example, already have a loud and well-financed voice in the current political framework, whereas those who will benefit from a clean energy system often do not yet know who they are. A lot of the green transition is about making investments today to make savings tomorrow, and politics is largely about the short term. Politicians rarely present voters with propositions for the longer term, and that short-termism is really affecting the transition because so much of what is needed, both mitigation and adaptation, will only pay off over the next ten, twenty, thirty years.

How should the EU build public consent for green policies that can feel disconnected from citizens’ immediate concerns?

The image of EU policies being run by faceless bureaucrats in Brussels is a very effective way for ministers to shift responsibility away from decisions they themselves made in the Council.

The real problem is that deliberation happens at a high level, and it is quite hard for ordinary voters to be directly involved. One of the most interesting areas of democratic innovation wenow see across Europe is the use of deliberative forums, citizens’ assemblies and voter panels which can be very good ways of discussing complex and emotive issues. What we find from those exercises is that citizens, when they look at the science and deliberate together, tend to come to more sensible and comprehensive long-term solutions than elected politicians do. They actually want faster and more radical action on climate than politicians typically offer during election campaigns. That tells us something important about how representative democracy, as it has evolved, struggles with long-term challenges, and why deliberative democracy is essential to supplement it.

Does the Green Deal give the EU more weight in the world, or does it risk looking like a project designed only for wealthy economies?

It can go either way. What is essential is that the EU makes the Green Deal, or as it is now more often called, the Clean Deal, something which is about a global shift to sustainability, and not only for Europe. Its emissions trading system and the carbon border adjustment mechanism should be paired with efforts to help countries move into carbon pricing, which is so far the most effective tool for decarbonisation. It is also vital for the EU to become more involved in pushing global climate action, particularly now that the US has withdrawn so much from that space.

The EU is developing new tools, for example, the Clean Trade and Investment Partnership (CTIP), the first of which was signed with South Africa at the end of last year. This is a way of helping a country with decarbonisation within the framework of a wider relationship for sustainable development. It is also vital to maintain the momentum for decarbonisation now that so many countries are confronted with massively rising costs of fossil fuels. These wider implications of climate change really need addressing, and they call for leadership particularly from more developed economies — those which can afford to buy more on international markets, but which also need to help come up with longer-term solutions for countries that do not have the means to do so.

You have spent years working on EU enlargement. What does that experience tell you about how the EU should approach the transition in relation to Ukraine, the Balkans and its wider neighbourhood?

The EU has a very well-developed enlargement policy, which needs reimagining for the situation of Ukraine and Moldova, both frontline countries, with Ukraine actively defending itself militarily.

The EU needs to take a security-first approach and bring them into a renewed and fortified European security architecture, because of the military threats but also because of the US’s fast-changing approach to security in Europe and its lessening interest in NATO. The first thing the EU needs to do is make a new offer to Ukraine and Moldova that is really about security first, and then work on phased accession, as it has done with the Western Balkans, but with clearer conditions attached to each stage.

What skills will matter most in the next decade?

The key thing to remember about AI is that it is based on past patterns. What human intelligence can still do is break the mould and think about things which do not rely on past patterns. AI also cannot make the same kind of human connections as real humans can. It isthose deeper social skills of really being able to connect with another person intellectually as well as emotionally, to understand their point of view, and to communicate with empathy but also with intellectual excitement. A university degree gives you a depth of analytical capacity which allows you to communicate with other humans in ways that AI cannot. I would say build on those.

What areas should young researchers explore?

Connect up different aspects of security. There is water security, food security, and the security implications of climate impacts. There is also economic security in terms of the weaponisation of dependencies. And even on the defence side, military tactics have gone hybrid. Attacks on infrastructure designed to cause panic in a population are also major security issues. Many of these challenges cut across the continent and will require more coordination between EU countries, and therefore more work at EU level.

What gives you hope about Europe’s green transition today?

What gives me hope is that everybody under 30 is much more aware of the risks than people over 50. So many companies and individuals are continuing to work on sustainability — not shouting about it, but in practice doing it because they know they need to de-risk from the threats that climate change brings, and because they see the business opportunities in things like renewable energy. I am pretty sure the green transition will continue. I just hope it goes fast enough that we do not have to suffer a great many deaths and enormous damage before we start taking preventive action.