It’s not as simple as copy/paste: the EU’s reproduction of the High Ambition Coalition in international climate governance

The success of the High Ambition Coalition (HAC) at COP21 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2015 stands out as a high point in international climate governance. The coalition – the fruit of several years of outreach by the European Union (EU) – assembled a range of actors across the traditional developed-developing country divide in the UNFCCC. The HAC has been recognised in the literature as a key player in raising the overall ambition of the Paris Agreement and a success for the EU. Since then, the EU, along with other coalition partners, has sought to use the momentum of the HAC in pursuit of multilateral agreements on climate in other settings, but with mixed results. While ‘high ambition’-esque coalitions with EU involvement appeared successful in negotiations of the Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol (2016) and the IMO Initial Strategy to Reduce GHG Emissions in Shipping (2018), the HAC appeared largely irrelevant at negotiations for the ICAO Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (2016). Therefore, it is essential to understand the precise conditions and elements that facilitate successful EU-involved, ambition-based coalitions in these negotiations. Using process-tracing, this paper answers the question: How has the EU successfully (or not) reproduced the High Ambition Coalition in climate negotiations beyond the UNFCCC? The paper relies on a triangulation of semi-structured interviews with EU, EU member state, and third state officials involved with the coalition efforts, official EU and coalition documents, and press reports. In developing the causal mechanism, this paper contributes to the literature on the EU as a climate leader and its ability to lead outside of the UNFCCC. In that vein, it also contributes to the study of regime complexity in looking at the transferability of coalitions and negotiation strategies across different fora.