EU Climate Leadership in Copenhagen and Beyond

Abstract

For more than a decade, the European Union (EU) has been characterised as a leader in international climate policymaking (Bretherton and Vogler, 2006; Groenleer and Van Schaik, 2007; Oberthür, 2009). Yet the 15th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting in Copenhagen in December 2009 ended disappointingly (Dimitrov, 2010), especially for the EU (Metz, 2010). This situation calls into question the EU as a leader on climate issues and raises concerns about EU leadership. The current state of affairs is puzzling: Why is EU climate leadership being challenged given the Union’s huge efforts to get its new climate change legislation ready for the 15th COP in Copenhagen, which indicates that worldwide, the EU is the most ambitious actor in the fight against climate change? This chapter analyses EU climate leadership in the context of Copenhagen and beyond, examining the EU’s global role with regard to the challenge of climate change, and examining if it manages to shape global climate change policies. It explores these issues with a special view to the EU’s relations to developing countries and the Union’s potential to shape global development policy. On that basis, this Chapter attempts to answer the three main sets of questions raised in this book: whether EU policy is coherent with development goals; how, in the area of climate change, the EU institutional setting impacts on the formulation of coherent policies; whether the EU’s actions are well coordinated with other relevant actors and which actors are promising partners for alliance building.