Pereira, Leonardo (2026) EU Sustainability Regulation at a Crossroads. Bachelor thesis, Global Responsibility & Leadership (GRL).
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Abstract
The European Commission’s Omnibus I package, launched under the banner of “simplification,” reopened the recently adopted Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), provoking contestation across institutional, business, and civil society actors. This thesis asks how the legitimacy of EU sustainability governance is constructed and contested in this reform. Applying Scharpf’s (1999) input/output framework, it analyses 292 claims coded across 28 documents, including five expert interviews. The findings show that the debate is not mainly a clash between democratic procedure and policy performance. It is a struggle inside output legitimacy itself. Output claims dominate the corpus (73.6%), where pro- and contra-Omnibus actors share a vocabulary (competitiveness, legal certainty, coherence) but divide over its meaning. This thesis terms this frame capture to describe the institutionally authoritative redefinition of shared legitimacy vocabulary. It operates asymmetrically. The Draghi report’s competitiveness diagnosis was adopted selectively, with simplification operationalised within months while its investment counterpart stalled. Additionally, a procedural critique spanning all clusters questions its evidentiary basis. The contest exposes structural tensions between regulatory stability and political responsiveness, and between internal recalibration and external standard-setting. EU sustainability governance thus stands at a crossroads, where legitimate simplification is defined less by evidence than by who commands the vocabulary.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor) |
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| Name supervisor: | Schulz, K.A. |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Jun 2026 11:01 |
| Last Modified: | 10 Jun 2026 11:01 |
| URI: | https://campus-fryslan.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/805 |
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