Output / Publication
Mapping Europe's Digital Agenda
A Policy Tracker for the 2024–2029 Commission
EU Digital Policy: Sourced & Tracked
The EU's digital policy agenda is ambitious, sprawling, and — until now — without a single coherent overview. We set out to change that.
“It is we who decide our rules, not big tech.”
Ursula von der Leyen, State of the Union Address, 10 September 2026
With those words, the Commission President outlined her priorities for the months ahead. But understanding what the EU is actually doing on digital policy requires looking beyond any single speech. It means navigating years of overlapping legislative tracks, strategic communications, Council conclusions, and non-legislative initiatives — spanning AI, infrastructure, skills, competition, data governance, and more.
The problem: no map existed
The EU's 2024–2029 digital agenda is ambitious and remarkably hard to read as a whole. Initiatives sit in separate institutional silos, regulatory domains overlap without a shared frame and apart from the narrow Digital Decade Policy Programme of the previous mandate, there is no official overview of the current mandate's digital agenda to use as guidance.
For anyone working in this space — researchers, practitioners, policymakers, journalists — the result is the same: you either know one corner of the agenda well, or you spend considerable time piecing together the picture yourself.
What we built
Together with Johannes Fritz and Tommaso Giardini at the St. Gallen Endowment for Prosperity through Trade, our Fellow of Practice Kai Zenner set out to fill that gap.
The result is a browsable digital policy tracker mapping the EU's digital agenda for the 2024–2029 legislative cycle — collecting, classifying, and contextualising the legislative and non-legislative initiatives through which Europe's digital transformation is being shaped during this Commission mandate, framed by the European Parliament elections of June 2024 and the next elections expected in June 2029. This strategic map is an attempt to make visible, in one coherent picture, what EU institutions themselves currently treat as the most important activities of the digital agenda.
Not sure where to start?
We've put together a PDF overview as a cheat sheet — presenting the eight clusters with a timeline of key initiatives and direct links into the tracker.
How the tracker is organised
Rather than sorting initiatives by regulatory domain, the tracker uses an eight-category strategic sequence drawn from Commission Work Programmes, Council Conclusions, Joint Declarations, and major communications of the current cycle. The sequence reflects the functional logic of how Europe's digital transformation actually works:
Europe's digital policy follows a clear arc: first, (1) generate scientific knowledge and translate breakthrough technologies into industrial capacity; then (2) build the infrastructure — secure networks, sovereign compute, clean energy systems, space-based infrastructure, and strategic raw materials — needed to run them. From there, (3) deploy AI and data at scale across industry, public services, and the wider economy. To sustain that, (4) mobilise private and public capital and modernise the rules that shape competition, state aid, procurement, and capital markets. In parallel, (5) grow skills and talent, attract global expertise, and improve working conditions. This requires (6) deepening the Single Market and digitalising compliance. Across all of this, (7) strengthen security, partnerships, and democratic resilience — abroad and at home. Finally, (8) implementation, simplification, and better regulation ensure that the whole agenda delivers coherently.
Crucially, these eight categories are functions, not domains. A policy area such as energy, defence, or skills may appear in more than one category depending on whether its relevance is to building infrastructure (2), deploying AI and data (3), enabling competitiveness (4), developing human capital (5), or strengthening external resilience (7). This allows the tracker to cut across institutional silos and to show the agenda as the EU itself has articulated it, rather than as any single directorate-general would frame it.
Feedback
The tracker is a living document, and we are actively improving it. Feedback from the community is not only welcome but essential to making this as useful as possible. If you've tried out the tracker and have thoughts, corrections, or additions, please reach out to Kai Zenner or Johannes Fritz below.
