The EU’s different faces in climate diplomacy: leadership, interests, and responsibilities

ABSTRACT

Climate change politics is a key area where the EU demonstrates an ambition for global leadership. Yet, analysts and practitioners point to significant disconnections between the EU’s discourse and practice in this area. In what particular ways do these disconnections occur? This article uses the concepts of ‘organised hypocrisy’ and ‘organisational façades’ to address this question. Offering a framework to analyse the EU’s talk, decisions, and actions in climate diplomacy, these two concepts provide a nuanced understanding of the way in which the Union handles conflicting demands from strategic actors in global climate politics. This article argues that engaging in hypocrisy by portraying different facets of the Union has been a primary way in which the EU has managed to adapt its negotiation positions in climate diplomacy by addressing conflicting external conditions.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate diplomacy
• environmental foreign policy
• organised hypocrisy
• organisational façades
• organisation theory

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Richard Whitman, Eske van Gils, Robert Kissack, Mustafa Kutlay, Frauke Ohler, and Jonas Schönefeld for their helpful suggestions on earlier iterations of this paper. I also thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors of the Journal of European Integration for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s) 2017.

Additional information

Funding

The authors have no funding to report.