How Cycling Rode to the European Agenda

In 2024 the European Declaration of Cycling was signed as a tri-institutional declaration by the European Commission, Council of the European Union and the European Parliament. For the first time, cycling was acknowledged as a fully fledged mode of transport in a EU-level framework and through it, cycling now sits officially on the agenda of the EU. Yet this level of political attention was for many unthinkable just a few years ago and interest groups had prior to the declaration lobbied for multiple years without success. This thesis views cycling’s rise to the EU-agenda as a successful case of agenda-setting, and seeks to explain how cycling could go from a quintessential local issue to the corridors of Brussels. By adopting the agenda-setting framework developed by Kingdon in combination with recent literature on interest-groups, this thesis explores the underlying conditions enabling this development as well as the agency of interest groups. Through the conduction of a deductive theory-guided process tracing I develop a causal explanation of the agenda-setting process. The thesis finds that attention brought to urban mobility by Covid-19 in combination with a new political landscape following the green deal created favorable conditions for agenda change, which interest groups exploited through detailed strategies and access to key decision-makers.