Leveraging EU Trade Power for Climate: Advancing climate goals through preferential trade agreements and their bodies

While it remains the primary goal of the EU’s preferential trade agreements (PTAs) to advance market access for EU companies, the EU also portrays these agreements as powerful tools to pro-mote and achieve foreign policy objectives vis-à-vis third countries in seemingly unrelated issue areas. While its success in inserting respective provisions into the PTAs it negotiates is well-documented, the academic literature suggests that a major role for EU efforts to promote non-trade objectives falls to the bodies created by its PTAs to facilitate and institutionalize exchange and dialogue between the parties on matters covered by an agreement. Yet, so far, we know little about whether and how such bodies foster non-trade issues. Focusing on the issue of climate change mitigation, this paper presents new data from the PTA implementation stage to assess when and how the EU promotes greater climate action towards its PTA partners once an agreement is in place. To what extent does the EU make use of the institutional frameworks provided by its PTAs to engage its trade partners on climate issues and promote its climate objectives? And what explains both when climate issues are inserted into the discussions and the way they are dis-cussed with different trade partners? By collecting and analyzing original data on climate topics at PTA bodies, the paper makes a twofold contribution: First, it compiles new data to assess to what extent climate-related issues feature at PTA meetings, relying on the analysis of text documents related to these meetings. Meeting minutes from more than 150 meetings of 37 bodies under 16 EU PTAs from 2012-2022 show that PTAs are indeed used by the EU as vehicles to promote climate objectives to its trade partners, as the EU routinely engages its trade partners in discussions on climate-related topics at these meetings. Second, it theorizes and empirically tests what drives variation in climate-related discussions, linking meeting activities to specific PTA provisions as well as to strategic political priorities of the European Commission and partner country characteristics. In doing so, the paper opens the black box of PTA bodies and their activities with regard to climate change mitigation at the treaty implementation stage, and speaks to the debate on the conditions under which the EU leverages its trade power for non-trade objectives.