Podcast with Connie Hedegaard on climate policy and EU politics

How do you push 27 EU member states toward a single climate target when every country has different interests? Former EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard reveals the invisible mechanics of political collaboration , from backroom negotiations to cross-sector coalition building. Subscribe for more episodes on how collaboration works under real-world pressure. Connie Hedegaard brings a rare combination of journalism, national politics, and EU-level policymaking to a conversation about what collaboration actually looks like when the stakes are planetary. Having served as Denmark's Minister of the Environment and then as European Commissioner for Climate Action, she led the political process that produced the EU's 40 percent climate targets for 2030 , a precursor to the Paris Agreement. The central insight is that political collaboration operates nothing like the textbook version. Hedegaard describes a process where formal institutions are only one layer of a much more complex system. Achieving climate targets required simultaneous engagement with knowledge institutions, businesses, NGOs, civil society, and informal networks , pushing buttons inside and outside the political world that most observers never see. Hedegaard draws a sharp distinction between political and academic collaboration. Researchers can pursue their own truth; politicians must find landing zones. Compromise is not a weakness but the operating system of democratic policymaking. This creates a fundamental tension when scientists produce relevant knowledge but fail to understand the decision-making processes through which that knowledge must travel to have impact. The conversation addresses the Copenhagen COP15 experience directly. Hedegaard describes how the failure to reach a binding agreement revealed the limits of multilateral collaboration when trust breaks down between major powers. The lesson was not that collaboration is impossible at scale, but that process design matters enormously , who is in the room, how information flows, and whether participants feel ownership of the outcome. On building coalitions, Hedegaard offers a concrete example: the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance. It started not with governments but with philanthropic foundations convening stakeholders, broadening the circle, building shared understanding, and only bringing the initiative to the political arena when it was mature enough to succeed. This staged approach, starting small, building trust, then scaling, emerges as her model for effective collaboration. She identifies short-term thinking as humanity's greatest obstacle to sustainable collaboration. If she could change one thing, it would be replacing instant self-interest with a genuine sense of responsibility for future generations , not as a catchphrase but as embedded behavior. Part of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum series on Collaboration, produced with the Convergent Science Network.