Instructed by whom? Disentangling links between ‘Brussels’ and EU Delegations in implementing climate and energy diplomacy

The Lisbon Treaty introduced considerable institutional changes and innovations to boost European Union (EU) foreign policy-making. One of these changes was the transformation of previous Commission Delegations into Union Delegations and their integration into the newly established European External Action Service (EEAS). As such, the Lisbon Treaty and the 2010 Council Decision significantly altered the institutional status and practices of the EU’s diplomatic representations in third countries. This also relates to the crucial question of who instructs Delegations. According to the 2010 Council Decision (Art. 5) instructions to Heads of Delegations come from the High Representative and EEAS and ‘in areas where the Commission exercises the powers conferred upon it by the Treaties, the Commission may … also issue instructions’. We thus expect a key change in links between Delegations and Headquarters, primarily in terms of the question of who the main counterparts to EU Delegations are. By building on interview data from more than 130 interviews with EU diplomats in various third countries, this paper analyses the links, i.e. lines of instructions and interactions, between EU Delegations and their various Brussels counterparts. The paper uses the cases of EU climate and energy diplomacies, two non-traditional areas of EU foreign policy, in which the EU holds shared competences and Member States have conferred powers to the Commission in climate, and to a lesser extent, in energy policies. We argue that the interlinkages between Delegations and Brussels institutions (i.e. various EEAS units and Commission Directorate Generals) are for more complex than the EU Treaties and the current state of the literature suggest.