Changes in EU energy policy. Towards integration or a burst?

The European energy policy is considered a classic example of the EU regulatory State. Despite this historical path taken, with both regulatory means and liberal goals, major changes have appeared throughout time displaying an interventionist turn resulting in a multiplication of strands in the sectoral policy: market enhancement, securing supply, and environment protection. The resulting policy mix is inconsistent and present risks of inefficiency or even failure. This could reflect a broader challenge to the market-liberal paradigm by both geopolitics and climate-based ideas. Nevertheless, the adoption of such disruptive reforms is intriguing. However, neither do the literature displays sufficiently fine-tuned empirical enquiries into the policymaking black box nor do it ground the claim of a paradigm change. To fill this gap, this thesis proposes to use a cognitive analysis to retrace the policymaking throughputs underlying the changes. This research will build-on the concepts of securitisation and riskification as explanatory mechanisms. It aims to do so by identifying the framing processes that have prevail in the decision-making. It will mostly rely empirically on interviews with EU decisionmakers and official documents analysis. Once the data will have been collected and analyse, they will be combined into a coherent image of the unveiled policy black box using process-tracing, revealing the rationale behind the reforms and informing the question of a changing paradigm.