A nice tail wind: understanding the EU’s successful outcome through turbulence at the IMO initial strategy

In April 2018, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) reached agreement on its initial strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from international shipping. The agreement represented an important step in international climate action, particularly for the transport sector. While European Union (EU) officials applauded the agreement and stressed the leading role of the Union and its Member States in the negotiations, little is known about their precise role therein and what factors led to the out-come. Using process-tracing, this article answers the research question: Why was the EU able to achieve its negotiating objectives in the 2018 IMO initial strategy for shipping? In doing so, it provides in-sight into the complexity surrounding emissions reductions in shipping at the EU and international levels. Based on a triangulation of official documents and eleven semi-structured interviews, the article finds that the EU’s successful outcome in the negotiations was not simply a reflection of long-standing ambition to reach an agreement in the IMO, but a more complicated mechanism triggered by favourable external circumstances and an entrepreneurial coalition partner. Flexible EU-level coordination then facilitated the Union’s position that was successfully operationalized by motivated EU institutional actors during the IMO negotiations. The article finally puts our findings on the negotiations in the framework of the European Commission’s European Green Deal (EGD) proposal, which includes several ambitious provisions on climate action in the (international) maritime sector. It concludes by elucidating the potential challenges and opportunities the EU faces in greening the maritime sector as foreseen in the EGD.