Lisanne Groen

The European Union at the Copenhagen climate negotiations: A case of contested EU actorness and effectiveness

This article analyses the extent of European Union (EU) actorness and effectiveness at the 15th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009. Although the EU has been characterised as a leader in international climate policy-making for some time, the COP 15 meeting in Copenhagen has overall brought about disappointing outcomes for the Union. This casts doubts on EU actorness and effectiveness in this field. We take the article by Jupille and Caporaso as a conceptual point of departure and then specify a more parsimonious actorness framework that consists of coherence and autonomy. Effectiveness is conceptualised as the result of actorness conditioned by the ‘opportunity structure’, that is, the external context that enables or constrains EU actions. We hold that EU actorness was only moderate, especially given somewhat limited coherence. In terms of the opportunity structure, we argue that the strong involvement of other important actors with rather different positions adversely impacted on EU effectiveness, along with a high degree of politicisation that constrained the European Union’s ability to negotiate effectively.

The Effectiveness Dimension of the EU's Performance in International Institutions: Toward a More Comprehensive Assessment Framework

In this article, we develop a comprehensive framework for assessing the effectiveness dimension of the EUs performance in international institutions, consisting of three elements: (1) the quality of the EUs policy objectives; (2) EU engagement in the negotiations, including its fit with the international constellation of power and interests; and (3) goal achievement. We apply this assessment framework to two cases with two phases each: (1) the negotiations on the 2010 Nagoya Protocol on genetic resources to the Convention on Biological Diversity and (2) the negotiations under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change toward the 2009 Copenhagen and 2011 Durban climate summits. The analysis demonstrates that the assessment framework (1) facilitates a more complete and richer appreciation of EU effectiveness in international institutions than the established understanding of effectiveness as goal achievement and (2) allows us to start to systematically explore the interaction between the frameworks three components.

Explaining goal achievement in international negotiations: the EU and the Paris Agreement on climate change

ABSTRACT The Paris Agreement on climate change adopted in December 2015 reflects EU policy objectives to large extent. To find an explanation, we develop a general framework that incorporates both structural and actor-/process-related factors, paying particular attention to negotiation strategy and diplomacy. On this basis, we argue that the high level of EU goal achievement in Paris resulted from the interplay of (1) evolving international structures, (2) effective EU strategy fitting these structures and domestic politics, and (3) favourable situational circumstances. While the EU arguably pushed others to their limits, downscaled ambitions also meant that it accepted a Paris Agreement that is insufficient by itself and needs to be strengthened quickly. The application of our conceptual framework to the Paris Agreement demonstrates its added value and that it can build the basis of a fresh programme of work comparing the EU’s performance in international institutions/negotiations across time and policy fields.

The EU’s Role in International Climate Change Policy-Making: A Global Leader in Decline?

This chapter assesses the European Union’s (EU) role in international climate change policy-making by comparing the EU’s degree of goal attainment at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) negotiations in Copenhagen in 2009 and Cancun in 2010. By making use of three analytical factors (coherence, the opportunity structure and politicisation) we assess the outcomes of both negotiations for the EU. The Durban negotiations of 2011 are touched upon in the conclusions.

Challenges in EU External Climate Change Policy-Making in the Early Post-Lisbon Era: The UNFCCC Copenhagen Negotiations

The 15th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting held in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December 2009, which took place one week after the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon on 1 December 2009, has brought about rather disappointing outcomes from the perspective of the European Union (EU), which had previously displayed substantial leadership within the UN climate regime. Contrary to the EU’s objectives for the COP15 meeting, no legally binding agreement was reached to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after 2012 and the final Copenhagen Accord contained disappointingly few ambitious targets. This chapter tries to explain how this result came about and what the main challenges have been for the EU in this context. In the first place, we argue that the EU’s internal decision-making process was far from optimal. The unanimity rule, in combination with the heterogeneity of preferences of the 27 different EU Member States on many agenda items, negatively affected the EU’s ability to play a leadership role at the negotiations in Copenhagen. Secondly, the EU’s outreach strategy towards third parties seems to have missed its effect because it was not sufficiently adapted to the highly challenging external context of the negotiations, namely the positions that major third parties like the United States and China had adopted concerning a post-2012 climate regime. The entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon on 1 December 2009 does not seem to have had much effect on the EU during the Copenhagen negotiations held one week later. Overall, it seems that the Lisbon provisions point into the right direction and could help to overcome some of the challenges that the EU currently faces in the conduct of its external climate policy. An analysis of the EU’s performance at future UNFCCC COP meetings, which are held once a year in December, should facilitate finding an answer to the question of how the Lisbon provisions will be implemented in this particular field.