Challenges in EU external climate change policy-making in the early post-Lisbon era: The UNFCCC Copenhagen negotiations

Abstract

The 15th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP) meeting held in Copenhagen from 7 to 18 December 2009, which took place one week after the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon on 1 December 2009, has brought about rather disappointing outcomes from the perspective of the European Union (EU), which had previously displayed substantial leadership within the UN climate regime. Contrary to the EU's objectives for the COP15 meeting, no legally binding agreement was reached to succeed the Kyoto Protocol after 2012 and the final Copenhagen Accord contained disappointingly few ambitious targets. This chapter tries to explain how this result came about and what the main challenges have been for the EU in this context. In the first place, we argue that the EU's internal decision-making process was far from optimal. The unanimity rule, in combination with the heterogeneity of preferences of the 27 different EU Member States on many agenda items, negatively affected the EU's ability to play a leadership role at the negotiations in Copenhagen. Secondly, the EU's outreach strategy towards third parties seems to have missed its effect because it was not sufficiently adapted to the highly challenging external context of the negotiations, namely the positions that major third parties like the United States and China had adopted concerning a post-2012 climate regime. The entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon on 1 December 2009 does not seem to have had much effect on the EU during the Copenhagen negotiations held one week later. Overall, it seems that the Lisbon provisions point into the right direction and could help to overcome some of the challenges that the EU currently faces in the conduct of its external climate policy. An analysis of the EU's performance at future UNFCCC COP meetings, which are held once a year in December, should facilitate finding an answer to the question of how the Lisbon provisions will be implemented in this particular field.