The EU at the Second UNGA Committee: Promoting sustainable development and climate change?

The EU is a leading actor in international negotiations concerning climate change and sustainable development. At the UN, these negotiations take place at the Second Committee of the General Assembly, where under ‘sustainable development’, a broad array of issues is discussed, including climate change. While the expectation would be that the EU would have been very active in promoting sustainable development at the UNGA, the data tells another story. Assessing the verbatim records of the Second Committee from 2004 until 2023, the article pinpoints an unexpectedly small record of interventions coming from either the EU member states or EU officials. In order to examine this finding, there are three main questions to be answered: First, did the representation of the EU at the Second Committee change after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty? Second, can the fragmented system of the international sustainable development regime be blamed for by this low record? Third, could it be argued that we are witnessing burden-sharing within the EU representation, as a result of the changes that were brought by the Lisbon Treaty and the fragmented international system?