No abstract

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.

In this article, we develop a comprehensive framework for assessing the effectiveness dimension of the EU's performance in international institutions, consisting of three elements: (1) the quality of the EU's 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 framework's three components.

After its defeat at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, the EU can be considered to have scored a relative success with the Paris Agreement adopted in December 2015. With the mitigation ambition of the agreement exceeding expectations, the EU realized its policy objectives to a greater extent than it may have anticipated itself. This success was made possible by a moderation of the EU’s policy objectives pursued proactively through an EU bridge‐building and coalition‐building strategy. It was enabled and facilitated by the great‐power politics between China and the US as well as the French Presidency of the Paris conference. With Paris, the EU thus appears to have consolidated its role as a ‘leadiator’ in international climate policy, which it took on after the failure of the Copenhagen conference and road‐tested for the first time in Durban in 2011. In a multipolar climate world, this new role model should remain relevant for the years to come. However, the unpredictability of the underlying internal and external political, economic, and technological dynamics suggests the wisdom of a regular review and adjustment of strategy. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e445. doi: 10.1002/wcc.445 This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > International Policy Framework

No abstract