| Identifying the Climate Politicization of the EIB Using Natural Language Processing |
| Paper ID : 1169-IGA |
| Authors |
|
Ruyuan Liu * King's College London |
| Abstract |
| This paper aims to illuminate the complex relationships between Europeanization in climate policies via financial institutions, the various forms of politicization as conceptualized by Limbocker et al. (2022), and policy convergence. I assess the EIB's role as both a subject and an agent of these processes, considering how each dimension of politicization manifests in the bank's operations and decision-making. To assess whether the EIB does indeed carry out political objectives, this paper employs a multi-faceted approach. It examines the bank's legal and institutional framework, its policy alignment with EU political priorities, its partnerships and collaborations with other EU institutions, and its responses to significant political events assisted by natural language processing (NLP) techniques. This analysis draws upon EU legislation, EIB annual reports, and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Multilateral Development Bank (MDB) documents, 115 in total. The findings in this section show that coordination in the climate finance area among the UNFCCC MDB network, the EU, and the EIB is significant. It is revealed that the similarity between the EIB and the EU Green Deal documents is significantly higher. The UNFCCC MDB documents serve as the central node for document connectedness. This indicates that the EU Green Deal policy documents are also heavily influenced by the UNFCCC MDB documents. The temporal analysis also shows that there is dynamic interaction among the EU Green Deal, the UNFCCC MDB, and the EIB documents. |
| Keywords |
| NLP, climate finance, policy convergence, Europeanization, UNFCCC |
| Status: Accepted |
