Explaining EU influence in international environmental negotiations

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to explain variation in the EU’s influence on specific issues negotiated in international environmental forums. Analysing twelve issues in the United Nations Environment Assembly, the Convention on Biological Diversity as well as the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions, the paper identifies combinations of conditions that explain the EU’s level of influence. Through a qualitative comparative analysis, it studies the impact of the EU’s ambition, flexibility and isolation on the EU’s influence. It finds a high ambition combined with a low isolation as a key explanation of the EU’s high influence. For the EU’s low level of influence, a variety of causal paths are possible, such as a low ambition combined with a low degree of flexibility. The paper’s primary data source are interviews with EU delegates, who were closely involved in the negotiations.

KEYWORDS:

• Influence
• environmental negotiations
• EU
• QCA
• environmental ambition

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Katja Biedenkopf, Tom Delreux, Joseph Earsom, Patrick Mello, Johannes Müller Gómez, Nena Oana and Jan Orbie for their helpful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful for the feedback received by the participants of the EUIA and ECPR SGEU conferences, as well as to the three anonymous referees of this journal for their valuable input and comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. The EU is understood as the EU institutions and its member states.

2. Following QCA logic, calibration is asymmetric and ‘low’ should technically be read as ‘not high’ (see Rubinson et al. 2019). For reasons of clarity, I refer to ‘low’ and ‘high’ throughout the paper.

3. More details are provided in the supplementary file.

4. Most interviews were conducted during the COVID pandemic, making the online format necessary.

5. For the QCA analysis, the software Tosmana has been used (Cronqvist 2019).

6. One simplifying assumption was made. High ambition, low flexibility and high isolation is assumed to lead to a low influence. This is based on the individual conditions relation to EU influence. Based on the literature and as outlined in section 2.2., all conditions individually are more likely to lead to a low than a high EU influence.

7. More details can be found in the supplementary file.

8. In this overview, I use the main Boolean operators, which are the logical OR (+) and the logical AND (*). Upper case letter refers to the presence of the concept (i.e. high ambition, high flexibility, high isolation and high influence), whereas lower case letter refers to the absence of the concept (i.e. low ambition, low flexibility, low isolation and low influence).

9. Consistency is 1 in all cases, as the cases sharing a combination of conditions display the same outcome (Ragin 2006). Coverage indicates the degree to which the causal combinations account for the outcome (Ragin 2006).

Additional information

Funding

The research project was funded by the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS, grant number Fonds De La Recherche Scientifique - FNRS 1.A.787.19F.