How Does the European Union’s System of External Representation Affect the Implementation of International Agreements? The Case of the Paris Climate Accord

In the Paris Agreement of 2015, the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) committed themselves to mitigate global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. While the EU and its member states have already adopted relevant measures pointing to an overall strategy to implement the targets of the Paris Accord, the Canadian government and the Canadian provinces have not yet been able to overcome internal differences and agree on a joint programme to achieve their climate targets. This paper aims to unpack the processes that help explain these diverging outcomes. Existing literature has mainly focused on policy preferences and party politics, public opinion and interest groups as well as the number of veto-players and corporatist structures as explanatory factors for different levels of international compliance and environmental performance. Comparative federalism theory, for its part, has pointed to the distribution of competences and intergovernmental relations in order to explain why certain (quasi-)federal systems perform more successfully in terms of meeting their climate commitments. Exploratory and descriptive case studies within the comparative federalism literature have identified the potential importance of the joint representation of the EU institutions and the member states at international meetings, on the one hand, and the exclusion of the Canadian provinces from international forums, on the other. However, the effects of these different forms of international representation and the causal mechanisms leading to the (non-) implementation of international agreements have been under-researched and under-theorised. Against this backdrop, this paper asks how the (non-) involvement of the sub-federal level in the international climate negotiations affects the accomplishment of climate commitments. This paper argues that the joint representation of a (quasi-) federal system in international negotiations by both the federal and the sub-federal executives leads to a sense of joint ownership as well as shared responsibility and accountability on both levels of government, which explains the adoption of a comprehensive cross-level strategy to fulfil the climate commitment jointly. Conversely, the lack of involvement the sub-federal level during the international climate talks leads to a lack of commitment on the part of the sub-federal entities and consequently to the failure to develop an effective programme for implementing the Paris Agreement. I use theory-guided process-tracing to test the explanatory power of these theorised causal mechanisms.