The regional program approach of EU’s climate governance: Describing and explaining cross-regional variance

The European Union is known for its prominent role in developing and promoting climate norms internationally. The EU has three distinct approaches to climate governance in third countries– using bilateral agreements with individual countries, contributing to the development of international climate treaties, as well as using a regional program approach that targets geographical regions with multilateral multi-year programs. The first two approaches to climate governance are well studied in the existing literature; meanwhile, the regional program approach is more recent and is much less addressed in existing works. In this article, we conduct a comparative study of the EU’s regional climate programs pertaining to Clima East, Clima South, EU4Climate, ClimaMed, EUROCLIMA, EUROCLIMA+, as well as the Regional Environment and Climate Regional Accession Network program. More precisely, we describe existing regional climate cooperation programs of the EU, trace their development over time, and explain variance across the regional programs. To that end, we develop and test three hypotheses that individually emphasize the role of state capacity, geographic proximity to the EU, and emissions. In doing so, the article sheds new light on the region-level factors which facilitate the establishment of regional climate cooperation between the EU and external partners. The article builds on document analysis, the findings are complemented by interviews with EU-level officials.