The EU’s Climate Diplomacy Architecture and Practices: What Role for the Delegations?

With the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the European External Action Service (EEAS) was created and the previous ‘Commission’ Delegations were transformed into ‘EU’ Delegations that are part of the EEAS. This institutional innovation has altered the architecture and practice of EU diplomacy with important changes also in the area of climate change. This paper analyses the new structure of EU climate diplomacy from a principal-agent perspective, by tracing the various links among the ‘climate diplomats’ in the EU Delegations and their different institutional counterparts, most notably in the EEAS headquarter, the European Commission and the EU Member States. The analysis is based on over sixty-five interviews, mostly with so-called ‘climate focal points’—the main contact person for climate change in each of the EU Delegations—but also with a number of Brussels-based officials. It maps the links of the Delegation-based climate diplomats—as ‘agents’—with their ‘principals’ EEAS, Commission and Member States that directly or indirectly task them with climate diplomatic activities. Member State embassies complement the constellation as additional ‘agents’. The paper demonstrates that the chains of command and influence are more complex than the formal linkages would suggest. Various informal networks and links have emerged that complement the formal ones. This paper is the first to provide an extensive mapping of the practice of EU climate diplomacy by EU Delegations and to explain the evolving new institutional architecture surrounding it.