Climate norms in the EU's neighbourhood

The European Union (EU) positions itself as a global climate leader. One of the geographical areas where the EU's external climate promotion efforts are among the most visible is the European neighbourhood. There, the EU seeks to promote climate norms towards more sustainable and resilient climate future through a number of tools including policy networks, capacity-building initiatives, as well as via mitigation- and adaptation-related conditionality attached to economic integration projects. While the role of policy networks has recently received some scholarly attention in the context of the EU’s external climate governance, the role of climate norms in bilateral cooperation agreements remains little understood. More precisely, little is known about the determinants of the EU’s external climate governance, as most of the literature is primarily concerned with rather detecting EU’s effects on domestic legislation and practices. Building on the analysis of primary documents, the article maps EU’s climate norms promoted by the EU in its six Eastern partners—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. It aims at describing and explaining the differences across the set of norms promoted in each of the neighbours. The explanations of the cross-country differences build on existing interdependencies between the EU and the region, as well as country-specific climate risks. The article contributes to climate governance and Europeanisation literatures by explaining the EU’s engagement in climate governance in the neighbourhood.