What kind of role for the EU? Shifting strategic foci in the EU’s external climate, environmental, and energy action.

Since 2011, the European Union (EU) has repeatedly formulated plans to pursue ambitious external climate, environmental, and energy action. In Joint Communications and regular Council Conclusions, the various EU institutions have attempted to transform this ambition into operational strategies. While originally relatively narrow, the scope of these documents has broadened (e.g., integrating diverse issue areas into climate diplomacy, mentioning new policy instruments) over time, and seen mergers of different policy strands (e.g., joint climate and energy conclusions, move towards ‘green diplomacy’), before - most recently - becoming re-narrowed (e.g., focussing on ‘clean tech’ to the detriment of environmental issues). Over the past 15 years, the EU’s external climate, environmental, and energy ambitions have thus both matured and undergone significant changes. This paper provides a systematic analysis of these changes, focusing in particular on shifts in the EU’s ‘role conceptions’, that is, the Union’s understanding of its own appropriate behaviour, in the climate, environmental, and energy arenas. Building on ‘role theory’ (Aggestam 2006, 2021) and employing a discourse analysis of the EU’s policy documents, we elucidate the evolution of the EU’s self-image over time before explaining its ‘role change’ by focusing on the dynamic interplay between external (e.g. Russia’s war of aggression) and internal (e.g. shifting strategic priorities from the European Green Deal to the Clean Industrial Deal) developments throughout the studied period. We contribute to the academic literature by adding a novel conceptual perspective and updated empirical insights on the EU’s external climate, environmental, and energy action. Additionally, our insights offer an outside-in perspective on the normative debates about the EU’s continued willingness and capacity to invest into ‘green’ issues and provide global leadership in response to the triple planetary crisis in times of geopolitical tensions.