Taking the lead: informal division of labour in the EU's external environmental policy-making

Abstract

The article examines the informal division of labour in the European Union's (EU's) external environmental policy-making. It focuses on informal arrangements in the EU co-ordination and representation processes with regard to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and international climate negotiations. Whereas the rotating Presidency is formally in charge of leading the internal EU co-ordination and representing the EU externally, we see that in practice an informal system is used, in which member states and Commission officials informally ‘take the lead’. Based upon new-institutionalist insights, this article argues that four functional reasons explain the informality in the EU's external environmental policy-making: burden sharing; expertise pooling; involving member states; and guaranteeing continuity. Moreover, once the informal arrangement is in place, actors in the EU keep using it because they act path-dependently and because it is considered the most appropriate way to act in many international environmental negotiations.

Keywords:

• Climate negotiations
• Commission on Sustainable Development
• informal division of labour
• issue leaders
• lead countries
• lead negotiators

Notes

We interviewed 10 member state representatives, three Commission officials and two officials working at the Council Secretariat. Six of these interviewees have performed a lead country, lead negotiator or issue leader task in the CSD or climate negotiations between 2008 and 2009. The interviews were conducted in Brussels between May 2009 and March 2010.

Moreover, a lead country system, similar to the one used in CSD negotiations, has also been applied during the final negotiation stages leading to the Stockholm Convention (Delreux 2011: 114–15).

Those were sub-clusters on: (1) agriculture, land and rural development; (2) drought and desertification; (3) Africa; (4) cross-cutting issues and interlinkages; and (5) water (for the review of the CSD-13 water and sanitation decisions).