Missed opportunities: The impact of EU institutional compartmentalization on EU climate diplomacy across the international regime complex on climate change

The international governance of climate change no longer takes place in one single forum – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – but is increasingly spread across a multitude of fora that collectively make up the International Regime Complex on Climate Change (IRCCC). Actors with leadership ambitions, like the European Union (EU), must therefore adapt their climate diplomacy in order to address the entirety of the regime complex. Over the past decade, the EU has appeared increasingly aware of the need for such an extensive diplomacy in the IRCCC, noting in Council Conclusions and other high-level documents its desire to use specific fora, like the G7, to advocate for its positions in multilateral agreements relating to climate elsewhere. Yet, the potential for such a comprehensive climate diplomacy seems undercut by the compartmentalization of EU institutional structures involved in coordinating action in the different fora of the IRCCC. Although the IRCCC fora all deal with different aspects of the larger climate issue, EU-level activity in each forum – as is the case for many other actors –is not uniformly synchronised and instead falls under the purview of a series of separate institutional structures based around policy areas. For instance, EU activity in the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is coordinated via the Transport, Telecommunications, & Energy Configuration of the Council and supported by DG MOVE of the Commission, while activity in the UNFCCC is organised in the Environment Configuration with the involvement of DG CLIMA. The EU’s presence in the G7 has traditionally been coordinated via the Council. Collectively, these different arrangements constitute a series of policy-making silos, which, with the exception of cursory, high-level coordination, seem to interact rather sparingly with each other. This paper seeks to understand the impact of such compartmentalization on how the EU cohesively works across the different fora. It answers the research question: How do EU internal coordination structures affect the the EU’s cross-forum coherence in its climate diplomacy across the IRCCC? Based on 50 semi-structured interviews with EU officials, EU member state officials, and third-state officials, it looks at the impact of internal institutional variables on (1) the types and frequency of cross-forum connections that the EU employed and (2) the consistency of its climate-related positions in different fora with respect to four climate agreements negotiated from 2015-2018: Paris Agreement (UNFCCC; 2015), Carbon Offsetting Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (ICAO, 2016), Kigali Amendment (Montreal Protocol; 2016), and the Initial Strategy on Reducing GHG Emissions in Shipping (IMO, 2018). This paper contributes not only to a more nuanced assessment of the EU as an international climate leader but also provides empirical evidence into two under-studied consequences of global governance complexity: (1) an actor’s cross-forum strategy in the context of negotiations inside one single forum of a global governance complex and (2) the impact of internal factors, namely policy silos, on said strategy, which is particularly important given the transversal, cross-sectoral nature of global governance complexes in general.