Defining the green to make future generations heard? The EU’s environmental classification systems of economic activities as a bottom-up conception of sustainability

The European Union has recently adopted different legislations that, principally or incidentally, classify economic activities as being environmentally sustainable. Implicitly, they aim at rendering elements that are deeply linked to intergenerational justice and the interests of future generations visible. This is most notably the case of the regulation 2020/852 that establishes a taxonomy for sustainable investments. Other less well-known examples include the Resilience and recovery facility with its green tagging mechanism, the green bonds regulation with its identification of activities that may be financed under that framework and, less recently, the Common agricultural policy with its environmental conditionalities and eco-schemes. This movement is accompanied by EU soft law instruments incentivising Member States to apply green classifications, such as the green budgeting initiatives. Although these instruments have a varying degree of preciseness and of scope, they all are creating an environmental taxonomy of socio-economic activities. This paper argues that while the EU taxonomy for sustainable investment has been understood as an informational tool that would help ensuring that financial actors have trustworthy information, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Environmental taxonomies – of which the EU taxonomy is progressively becoming the cornerstone – are also used directly by the EU to intervene in the economy in a more selective manner to advance an environmental agenda