Decarbonisation of the commercial road transport : The role of European Policy

Abstract: Following the Paris agreement of 2015, the latest reports of the IPCC, exacerbated by the lingering impacts of the Covid crisis and the recent war of aggression of Russia on Ukraine, the European Union is proposing an ambitious set of rules and regulations aimed at making Europe the first climate neutral continent by 2050. As a part of this so-called European Green Deal, the Fit for 55 package was introduced to align the existing and proposed legislature to ensure at least 55% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. In this thesis, I analyse selected policy instruments of the Fit for 55 package in combination with secondary material relevant to the sector of commercial road transport. This study’s content analysis is centred around topics emergent from literature, namely the market-creating framework for missionoriented policies, multi-level perspective on the process of change, and geography of sustainability transitions. The results point towards the complexity of the decarbonisation process of the road freight in relation to the number and variety of actors involved, the nature of dominant companies, ambiguities present in the policy instruments and the presence of numerous bottlenecks along the implementation process. Furthermore, despite the unifying goals of the European Union, the results suggested uneven spatial outcomes of the decarbonisation process.