EU Goal Achievement in the negotiation of the Paris Rulebook

The European Union is a major actor in the global climate change regime and multilateral climate negotiations. The EU has the ambition to be a front-runner and to lead by example. In multilateral climate negotiations, it is incessantly pushing for progress and for ambitious and legally binding international agreements to tackle the issue of climate change. However, despite its ambitions, its degree of goal achievement varies from one particular negotiation to another. This research aims to analyze the effectiveness of the EU in multilateral climate negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) by measuring and explaining the degree of EU goal achievement in the particular negotiation of the Paris Rulebook. The Paris Rulebook sets the terms for the application of the Paris Agreement, which is the most recent of the legally binding universal climate agreements. The negotiation of the Paris Rulebook is particularly important because it aims to make the Paris Agreement, in practice, fully operational.