What Comes After the European Green Deal? Analyzing the State and Perspective of the EU's Land Use and Conservation Policy

ABSTRACT The EU's Green Deal, a comprehensive policy package for sustainability transition in Europe, was launched in 2019 with the ambition to demonstrate global environmental leadership. It has been successful in establishing new EU environmental policy instruments, with a strong focus on sustainable land use and conservation, such as the EU Nature Restoration Law or the EU Deforestation Regulation. Recently, however, the Green Deal has lost political traction, and its sustainable land use and conservation‐oriented policy instruments are under pressure or have already been cut back. In this paper, we undertake a multidisciplinary assessment of the Green Deal, presenting four theoretical perspectives (policy analysis, international relations, political economy/macroeconomics, and political ecology). These perspectives provide a so far missing comprehensive analysis of the strategic situation of EU land use and conservation policy, rooted in complementary explanations for the emergence, evolution, and faltering of the Green Deal. We move on to present two pathways for future EU land use and conservation policy—one assuming a continuation of currently visible patterns of deterioration in environmental ambitions; the other arguing for the possibility of reinvigorating the policy as what may be labeled as a new, Social Green Deal.