EU Energy Cooperation in the Neighbourhood: Tailoring the Rules of the Game?

Abstract

Luigi Carafa’s chapter analyses the development of energy cooperation in the neighbourhood between the mid-nineties and today. Firstly, regional energy cooperation under three different frameworks, the Energy Community, the neighbourhood policy, and the Union for the Mediterranean is studied. Secondly, this chapter analyses bilateral energy cooperation with three key neighbours: Algeria, Egypt, Morocco. These differ in terms of market size, their relative energy interdependence with the EU, and the availability of indigenous energy resources. Importantly, this country-sample also captures the major geopolitical features of the EU’s external energy relations in the neighbourhood very poignantly: Algeria and Egypt are the two most important energy producing countries involved in cooperation with the EU, while Morocco is a key energy transit country towards Europe. Comparing engagement at the regional vs. the bilateral level, this chapter seeks to understand the nature of the commitments arising between the EU and its neighbours in the energy sector as well as the extent to which the EU is capable of building cooperation around its energy rules and policy-making institutions via functional cooperation. The central argument of this chapter is that energy cooperation in the neighbourhood demonstrates the EU’s ambition to project its internal sectoral activities also externally, but that the resulting power of the Union to engage its partners in functional cooperation is still limited in the energy sector: the sector-specific logic of external governance has an insufficient explanatory power in the case of energy cooperation. Especially at the bilateral level energy cooperation is strongly differentiated across countries—following macro-level rather than meso-level dynamics.