Missed opportunities: The impact of EU institutional compartmentalization on EU climate diplomacy across the international regime complex on climate change

Delreux, Tom [UCL] Earsom, Joseph [UCL]

The international governance of climate change no longer takes place in one single forum – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – but is increasingly spread across a multitude of fora that collectively make up the International Regime Complex on Climate Change (IRCCC). For ambitious actors with climate leadership ambitions, like the European Union (EU), the IRCCC offers the potential for connecting their activity across fora to achieve their climate objectives. Although the EU has appeared increasingly aware of the need to connect its activity across fora, the compartmentalization of EU institutional structures makes such connections unlikely. This paper seeks to understand the extent to which internal compartmentalization affects the EU’s ability to connect its activities across the IRCCC in support of its negotiation objectives across four climate agreements negotiated from 2015-2018: Paris Agreement (UNFCCC; 2015), CORSIA (ICAO, 2016), Kigali Amendment (Montreal Protocol; 2016), and the Initial Strategy on Reducing GHG Emissions (IMO, 2018). It answers the question: How do EU internal coordination structures affect the extent the EU demonstrates a comprehensive climate diplomacy across the IRCCC? Based on triangulation of official documents and 43 semi-structured interviews, it finds that internal EU compartmentalisation in general hinders the EU’s attempts to pursue a comprehensives climate diplomacy, though the compartmentalization worked in different ways across the four cases. Various combinations of a lack of communication channels, different priorities and policy framing, and a lack of resources and expertise contributed to situations where the EU was either limited in how it used specific fora or to the extent it used any fora at all to further its negotiation objectives.