Selling Justice, Losing Power? The EU’s Fading Climate Influence in the Indo-Pacific

The European Union has traditionally portrayed itself as a normative power in global climate governance, particularly through promoting just energy transitions. Yet in the Indo-Pacific – marked by rising energy demand and intensifying geopolitical rivalry – the EU’s normative claims are increasingly challenged. This paper argues that the region has become a critical testing ground for the EU’s transformation into a more strategic, interest-driven actor. Building on recent debates about the tension between normative power and geopolitical agency (Goldthau & Youngs 2023), we conceptualize just energy transition as a contested political project rather than a purely technocratic tool. Competing powers such as China, Russia, and the United States advance alternative investment models that are faster and less conditional, undermining the EU’s credibility in the Global South. Empirically, the study employs a comparative case design focusing on Indonesia and the Philippines. In Indonesia, the Just Energy Transition Partnership launched in 2022 has faced delays, limited disbursement, and criticism over governance and justice principles; the U.S. withdrawal in 2025 further exposed the fragility of the initiative. By contrast, in the Philippines, EU climate discourse remains marginal, as energy policy is framed primarily through security ties with the United States. We hypothesize that the EU’s difficulty in advancing just transition agendas stems from a mismatch between its normative framework and local political realities, compounded by multipolar rivalry. The paper contributes to debates on climate geopolitics, the limits of normative power, and introduces the concept of adaptive strategic normativity to capture the EU’s evolving hybrid posture.