The Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the EU’s 2030 Climate and Energy Policy Framework: Understanding the Crossovers

This paper aims to investigate the interaction between recent trends in EU and international climate governance. We start from the observation that both the 2015 Paris Agreement and the emerging EU Climate and Energy Policy Framework for 2030 mark the turn to a “softer” approach to governance based on policy plans, reporting and related accountability provisions. We argue that this parallelism may be due to concurrent (but largely unrelated) changes in the international and European constellation of interests, with the socialising effects of the Paris Agreement on the EU policy framework having a complementary role. We build our argument in three main steps. First, we review the literature on the relationship between international and EU (environmental and climate) governance to derive main hypotheses about how both levels of governance may affect each other (top-down implementation, uploading of European preferences, soft emulation/socialisation of international norms). Second, we review and compare the trends in international and EU climate governance from the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to the 2015 Paris Agreement in historical perspective, with a focus on the 2010s. Third, we investigate the evidence for the different hypotheses so as to explain/understand the development of climate governance at both levels. We conclude that the 2030 EU framework has been aligned with international trends mainly due to internal pressures. Overall, the paper makes a contribution to the debate about the role of the EU in international governance in general and global environmental/climate governance in particular.