EU Climate Diplomacy

Politics, Law and Negotiations

Stephen Minas, Vassilis Ntousas, Stephen Minas, Vassilis Ntousas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351599764
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Diplomatie et traités

The European Union has long played a leadership role in the global response to climate change, including the development and dissemination of climate-friendly technologies such as renewable energy. EU diplomacy has been a vital contributor to the development of international cooperation on climate change through the agreement of the United Nations Climate Convention, its Kyoto Protocol and, most recently, the Paris Agreement. In addition, the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States means that the EU contribution to climate diplomacy will become more important still, both in filling the leadership gap (together with other major economies) and in responding to any sabotage by the Trump administration.

This book will extend knowledge of the EU as a key actor in climate diplomacy by bringing together leading practitioners and researchers in this field to take stock of the EU's current role and emerging issues. Contributions will be grouped into three strands: 1) the interplay between EU climate diplomacy and internal EU politics; 2) how the EU's legal order is a factor that determines, enables and constrains its climate diplomacy; and 3) the EU's contribution to diplomacy concerning climate technology both under the Climate Convention and more broadly. Collectively, these contributions will chart the EU's role at a critical time of transition and uncertainty in the international response to climate change.

EU Climate Diplomacy: Politics, Law and Negotiations will be of great relevance to students, scholars and policymakers with an interest in international climate politics and policy, transnational environmental law and politics and EU studies more generally.

Section 1
Introductory material

1 Introduction

EU climate diplomacy in a time of disruption

Stephen Minas and Vassilis Ntousas

Climate change is the ultimate collective action problem facing the international community, with broadly distributed culpabilities and consequences that incentivize states to free-ride on the efforts of others. As such, even in the ‘best of all possible worlds’, it would be extremely difficult to solve. In our world, states, the private sector and civil society face the climate challenge in far less serene circumstances, not least including wilful abdication of responsibility and leadership by the government of the United States. The European Union, which has long been a leader in the crafting of collective responses to climate change, now bears an even greater share of the task of charting a progressive way forward.

Disruption is often presented as an unalloyed positive, and indeed, it is clear that technological disruption is making possible more ambitious responses to climate change. Already, renewable energy has played a major role in decoupling energy-related carbon dioxide emissions from global economic growth (International Energy Agency 2016). Technological innovation in areas such as electricity generation, digitalization of energy systems and improved storage capacity all promise to further disrupt the economics of energy in favour of greenhouse gas emission reductions (Helm 2017, pp. 62–88).

And yet, springing from the same dynamics of globalization and digitalization have also come the disruption of work, creating a new ‘precariat’ of zero-hours contractors (Standing 2014) and robbing millions of the dignity of labour, and the disruption of collective bonds of identity and solidarity, giving rise to what Pope Francis has labelled the ‘globalization of indifference’ (Friedman 2016). In turn, these economic disruptions have fed political disruption, stoked for years by distributive injustice and financial crisis and erupting in developed country elections over the past few years.

Multilateral diplomacy has also been disrupted as a result, upended by a wave of ‘populist’ politics. The United States has turned against multilateralism under a reactionary and inward-looking leadership, pledging to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and undermining cooperation in fora such as the United Nations, the G7 and G20. The United Kingdom has voted to leave the European Union, creating a discretionary crisis and forcing the EU institutions and Member States to devote resources and attention to the resulting ‘divorce’ proceedings. In short, ambitious projects for ‘global governance’ (Lamy 2012) and the provision of ‘global public goods’ (Kaul, Grunberg and Stern 1999) are checked by competing, centrifugal forces of alienation, disaggregation and separatism at various levels – of certain countries from the international community, of the Member State from the EU, of the province from the state and of the individual from society.

Finally, there is the biggest disruption of all to contend with: the disruption of natural climate systems through anthropogenic (human-induced) interference, leading to global warming, ocean acidification and future consequences of ultimately unknowable severity (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2014). The breaching of ‘planetary boundaries’ through climate change, biodiversity depletion and other planetary-level risks is pushing natural systems beyond the ‘safe operating spaces’ in which humanity has thrived (Rockstrom et al. 2009). Such has been the impact of human economic activity on the environment that some scientists have argued that human activity has resulted in the earth entering a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene (Galaz 2014, p. 2).

These problems have long been acknowledged, and since 1994, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has bound nations to the goal of preventing dangerous human impact on the climate system. But with each passing year, the window of opportunity for achieving the Convention’s objectives narrows. The Paris Agreement of 2015 was a major diplomatic breakthrough, but the challenges of implementation are immense.

It is in this context that an assessment of the European Union’s present – and potential – contributions to the diplomacy of climate change has become necessary. With the increasingly competitive economics of clean energy technologies and the entry into force of the Paris Agreement, there is significant momentum for building upon EU market and normative leadership. With the announced defection of the United States from the international climate regime, EU leadership has never been more important and indeed necessary.

This book analyses both the internal and the external dimensions of the EU’s engagement in the diplomacy of climate change. It examines how the domestic political and legal orders of the EU and its Member States shape, enable and constrain its international negotiating positions. It goes on to consider the EU contribution to a particularly important area of climate diplomacy, that of technology and sustainable energy, which is pursued through multiple for a including the UNFCCC and its constituted bodies, the framework of the Sustainable Development Goals, trade negotiations and overseas development assistance. The chapters that follow reveal the EU to be uniquely capable of pushing climate action forward, through the combination of its normative, legal, commercial, diplomatic and overseas development capabilities. With its network of institutions and Member States, the EU is also uniquely placed to contribute to the multiple international processes that address climate change. However, the chapters in this volume also reveal that the EU is challenged to shape and respond to emerging developments, such as the new approaches to technology under the Paris Agreement and the promotion of sustainable technology in a new generation of trade agreements.

Politics

In the multi-level game of EU decision-making, climate diplomacy is unavoidably political. Negotiations between Member States in the Council, with important inputs from the Commission and Parliament, result in the adoption of EU mandates to carry into international negotiations. In Chapter 2, Robert Ladrech argues that the party politics of Member State governments is an important determinant of the level of ambition of EU climate policy, consequently shaping the possibilities of EU climate diplomacy. Ladrech finds that the party leading a coalition government has usually been the most influential in shaping its climate policy and that centre-left parties have generally adopted more ambitious climate positions than centre-right parties.

The Paris Agreement may itself bear the stamp of party composition. The Paris Agreement was in significant part a triumph of EU and Member State diplomacy, through the assembling of the ‘High Ambition Coalition’ and, in particular, through the French conference presidency’s adroit conduct of both pre-conference diplomacy and the Paris climate conference itself. Through an ‘eminently political process’ (Ourbak 2017, p. 9), the top leadership of the Hollande administration allocated responsibilities for the pre-conference diplomacy and engaged in a global campaign to influence countries and non-state actors to support an ambitious Paris outcome. At the conference itself, the French presidency fostered party ownership of the process through an inclusive, open approach, respecting the rules of negotiation. Grounded in a progressive administration, the French presidency was also able to play the negotiation ‘to the left’ (Gonda 2016, p. 61), building vital bridges with the developing country caucus of the G77 and China.

However, returning to our theme of disruption, progressive politics, too, is changing, in response to the multiple crises that have menaced Europe and in response, also, to the electoral challenge of extreme right parties and even certain conservative parties that have proved eager to ape their tactics and positions. In Germany, the long period of ‘grand coalitions’ of the principal centrist parties is subject to growing pressures. In France, the experiment of La République En Marche offers a new departure for social liberalism – with the destination unknown.

Following the political upheavals of the last 2 years, there is now the opportunity to build coherence across the twenty-seven Member States around a set of shared values and normative goals, prominently including climate action. There are promising early signs. In October 2017, the European Parliament stressed that ‘Europe must now take the lead in defending the Paris Agreement in order to secure the future of both our environment and our industries’ (European Parliament 2017, par. 10). Also at the European Parliament level, the possibility of transnational lists of candidates may be the next step in nurturing the European polity that, for our generation, is often simply assumed.

Such moves to build direct democracy at the European level would be complemented by the strengthening of ‘environmental democracy’ through the UNFCCC process. In Chapter 3, Emily Barritt sets out opportunities to increase public participation in the UNFCCC process, building on the success of the Aarhus Convention within Europe and the structured engagement of non-Party stakeholders before and after the Paris conference. Barritt contends that ‘climate diplomacy needs to be more democratic’. The EU, with its well-established internal processes to manage and represent diverse interests and multiple stakeholders, is well placed to contribute to this in practice.

Of course, the degree of climate leadership that the EU can provide is shaped not only by its internal dynamics but also by what other actors do on a diplomatic terrain which has fluctuated wildly in the years since the Climate Convention was adopted. Hayley Walker and Katja Biedenkopf demonstrate in Chapter 4 that the EU’s ‘cognitive leadership’ in the early years of climate diplomacy was augmented by ‘exemplary leadership’ and ‘entrepreneurial leadership’ during the early 2000s, with the agreement on operationalizing the Kyoto Protocol, including through flexible mechanisms, and the EU’s successful discharge of its emission reduction obligations under the first commitment period. However, EU influence was seen to wane in the years around the controversial Copenhagen conference, with EU ambitions not matched by other parties, before recovering in the pre-Paris diplomacy. Now, with the rejection of the Paris Agreement by the United States, the EU faces several potential scenarios, with a strengthened EU–China partnership the most ambitious alternative for steering the negotiations.

Law

The EU’s unique structure as a regional integration project built through law has had a significant impact on its climate diplomacy. At the international level, the credibility of EU positions ultimately depends on the EU’s ability to implement climate commitments through Union and Member State law. The process of legal implementation is complex, often slow and can result in suboptimal policy outcomes. In Chapter 5, George Dellis and Eugenia Giannini examine how the EU’s 2020 renewable energy target has been implemented through the law of one Member State, Greece. Dellis and Giannini argue that domestic regulatory incentives to promote renewable energy supply have been inefficient. The embedding into law of the EU’s 2030 climate and energy targets, as advanced in the EU’s Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement, offers an opportunity to improve the legal frameworks of climate policy implementation, notably through the governance mechanism of the Energy Union.

At the Union level, the EU has a well-elaborated set of laws to govern climate change and sustainable energy, including with respect to new technologies, although these require updating to reflect the 2030 targets and the new Paris architecture. In Chapter 6, Stuart Bruce analyses both the key aspects of EU sustainable energy law and its interaction within the ‘decentralized’ governance of sustainable energy at the international level. Key international instruments beyond the UNFCCC include the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and regional seas conventions, regarding the sourcing and production of energy from the sea, and the Energy Charter Treaty and its Protocol on Energy Efficiency, regarding the international trade in energy.

The EU’s unique legal order also presents opportunities to add force to its climate diplomacy. In Chapter 7, Stephen Minas examines the Energy Community as a case study of the EU extending its diplomatic reach through its legal order. Under the Energy Community Treaty, non-EU Member States, principally in Eastern Europe, commit to implementing EU energy law in their domestic legal systems. By expanding the acquis which must be transposed to include new climate and renewable energy obligations, the Energy Community process can harmonize the regulation of its Contracting Parties with that of the EU, potentially also leading to convergence of positions in the UNFCCC negotiations. Notably, this process relies on the attractiveness of attaining membership of the EU.

Similarly, Megan Bowman demonstrates in Chapter 8 that the financial relations between the EU and external parties also have significant potential to augment climate diplomacy. Bowman argues that the Investment Plan for Europe is an ‘untapped opportunity’ for the large-scale mobilization of climate finance, including from the private sector. The European Fund for Strategic Investment is the key vehicle for this, as well as the announced expansion of the scope of financeable projects from the EU to also encompass Africa and the EU Neighbourhood. Financing will remain a central issue in climate diplomacy for the foreseeable future. As the United States breaches faith with the world’s climate-vulnerable communities, including through reneging on $2 billion in unpaid contributions that the Obama Administration had pledged to the Green Climate Fund, it is the EU that can do most to save the developed world’s honour.

Negotiations

At the international level, the practical business of climate diplomacy has long centred on the UNFCCC, with its Conference of Parties constituting the most important forum for negotiation. Alongside finance and capacity-building, technology is a crucial means of implementing the Convention and now the Paris Agreement, particularly through supporting the efforts of developing parties. In the climate context, technology refers to processes and know-how as well as physical infrastructure and products. Regarding climate technologies, the negotiations have in recent years been quite productive, with the creation of new institutions to support national efforts.

In Chapter 9, Matthew Kennedy discusses the emergence of climate technology cooperation under the UNFCCC, particularly through the creation of the Technology Mechanism and its institutions, the Technology Executive Committee and the Climate Technology Centre and Network. Kennedy demonstrates that to maximize climate technology outcomes, coherence of action is required not just among these institutions and UNFCCC Parties but also with important technology initiatives beyond the scope of the UNFCCC, such as the International Energy Agency’s Technology Collaboration Programme, the International Renewable Energy Agency and Mission Innova...