https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1326-6129
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ABSTRACT
The European Union (EU) has positioned itself as a global climate leader. The EU’s engagement with external climate governance is most visible in the six post-Soviet states of Eastern Europe. This article asks what drives the EU’s engagement with climate governance in the region. To answer this question, I distinguish between three logics of external climate action: self-interest, functional, and civilizing. By analyzing climate cooperation between the EU and the six states, I demonstrate that a combination of all three logics explains the EU’s engagement in external climate governance, but that the functional logic is slightly more prominent than the other two.
Acknowledgments
I thank members of Glocalizing Climate Governance (GlocalClim) project, as well as participants of a Global and Regional Governance workshop at Stockholm University for useful discussions. I also thank Anastassia Obydenkova and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on this article. Andrew Mash deserves credit for language editing.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Supplementary Material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.1974888
Notes
1. Historically, the European Commission’s Directorate-General (DG) for Environment was responsible for climate policy before DG Climate Action was created in 2009 (Dupont Citation2015, 9). Therefore, climate-related policies were often labeled environmental policies and there was little distinction made between the two terms. For example, policies related to ozone layer depletion were regarded as environmental. Since the establishment of a separate DG explicitly in charge of climate issues, environmental- and climate-related policies have been addressed separately, which is also reflected in the language used by the European Commission. Environmental concerns are typically understood as localized challenges, such as air quality, noise abatement, chemical spills, safe waste management, and recycling. Climate-related risks relate to more global challenges, such as greenhouse gas emissions, food insecurity as a result of more frequent droughts, infrastructure resilience to increasing temperatures, and sea level rise. Nonetheless, there are overlaps between the two DGs. For example, both DGs target emissions, although at different scales. The DG for Environment focuses on making industrial processes more sustainable while DG Climate Action prioritizes international efforts to reduce emissions.
2. For example, EU trade agreements with the following countries include clauses on sustainability: Canada, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Georgia, Japan, Mexico, Moldova, Singapore, South Korea, Ukraine, Vietnam, Central America (Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Guatemala), and Mercosur (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay).
3. For more on the EU’s dependence on Ukraine as a transit country for gas, see https://www.clingendaelenergy.com/files.cfm?event=files.download&ui=9C1DEEC1-5254-00CF-FD03186604989704.
4. On the EU’s cooperation priorities in its relations with Azerbaijan, see https://ec.europa.eu/neighborhood-enlargement/news_corner/news/partnership-priorities-between-eu-and-azerbaijan-reinforce-bilateral-agenda_en.
5. For more on the EU’s dependence on Belarus, see https://jamestown.org/program/belaruss-role-in-east-european-energy-geopolitics/.
6. For example, the EU’s engagement with climate governance in the neighborhood, as described in the Green Deal, is justified by needs-driven arguments (European Commission Citation2019a).
7. Deeper economic integration is prevented by the state’s poor record on human rights and democracy.
8. In 2013, Russia used a variety of political and economic instruments to suppress the Eastern Partners’ ambitions for economic integration with the EU. As in Armenia, this pressure led to a foreign policy U-turn in Ukraine, which rejected the long-planned Association Agreement. This change in foreign policy in favor of Russia triggered mass protest and a subsequent change of government, as well as a return to a pro-EU foreign policy.
9. Georgia’s EU membership aspirations date back to the 2004 Rose Revolution, Moldova’s to the 2005 declaration that European integration was a foreign policy priority, and Ukraine’s to the 2004 Orange Revolution (Freyburg et al. Citation2011). Others trace Ukraine’s aspirations for Euro-Atlantic integration to the 1990s (Shyrokykh Citation2018a).
10. For more on EU–Azerbaijan relations, see https://ec.europa.eu/neighborhood-enlargement/sites/near/files/eap_summit_factsheet_azerbaijan_eng.pdf.
11. On energy transit through Belarus, see https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125717/RU_21.pdf.
12. For a comparative review of the two programs, see Appendix Table 1, in the supplemental files.
13. Such cooperation takes place in short events, such as training workshops and seminars.
14. For more information, see https://europa.eu/capacity4dev/env-east/discussions/clima-east-project-announces-new-round-applications-its-expert-facility.
15. See the corresponding country profiles available on the EU4Climate webpage.
16. For more information, see the country profiles on the EU4Climate webpage.
17. Directive 2003/87/EC on establishing a scheme for greenhouse gas emission trading and Regulation (EC) 842/2006 on certain fluorinated greenhouse gases; Regulation (EC) No 1005/2009 of the European Parliament and the Council of September 16, 2009, on substances that deplete the ozone layer.