Since the launch of the Energy Charter Treaty in the early 1990s the EU has engaged in the extension of its emerging internal energy market rules to non-member countries. However, since the late 2000s EU authorities started to supplement its traditional instruments of external energy governance with instruments that have a better fit in the category of energy diplomacy, namely the use of foreign policy instruments to secure access to energy supplies abroad. The paper focuses on the concept of practices to provide a conceptualisation of the differences between the foreign policy practices of governance and diplomacy and the factors driving them. It argues that EU’s new external energy instruments sit uncomfortably between energy governance and energy diplomacy, alienating both energy industry and state actors, as well as introducing a source of tension within EU’s own external relations bureaucracies.
