Abstract
In the negotiations of a follow-up agreement to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) Kyoto Protocol, the European Union (EU) was a vocal proponent of revisiting the ways in which the organizing principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR) was enshrined. The chapter analyzes the ways in which the EU promoted its distinct interpretation of CBDR and how other Parties to the UNFCCC contested the EU’s interpretation during the four-year climate negotiations that culminated in the adoption of the 2015 Paris Agreement. We performed a qualitative content analysis of the Earth Negotiations Bulletins (ENB) on the climate negotiation meetings between 2011 and 2015, thereby identifying not only the main contesters of the EU’s norm understanding but also the main themes of contestation over time. The analysis revealed that the EU pursued a firm, yet compromise-building approach to promote its own (re)interpretation of CBDR. Faced with hard contestation by developing countries, the EU engaged in a less hardline discourse than some of the other developed countries. This bridge-building positioning positively affected the EU’s perceived legitimacy in the global effort to combat climate change.
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Notes
- 1.
In order to make the comparison of arguments more clear, the climate groupings were excluded, despite them also ranking high in this top 10 ranking [including the Like-Minded Developing Countries (LMDCs) (36 CBDR-related statements), African Group (34 CBDR-related statements), G77-China (25 CBDR-related statements)], since each of the above groupings combine a wide number of diverse actors (e.g., the G77-China grouping includes 134 Members) and partly also overlap with some of the top 10 states in the list (e.g., China).
- 2.
While the total number of coded statements (“codings”) was 709, there is some overlap in the coding of statements for individual actors and climate groupings (see previous footnote). All in all, the graph shows a number of 415 codings, which accounts for more than half of total codings.
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The research benefitted from funding from the University of Leuven Special Research Fund: C1 Project CONNECTIVITY
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Petri, F., Biedenkopf, K. (2020). Common but Differentiated Responsibility in International Climate Negotiations: The EU and Its Contesters. In: Johansson-Nogués, E., Vlaskamp, M., Barbé, E. (eds) European Union Contested. Norm Research in International Relations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33238-9_3
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