Missed opportunities: The impact of EU institutional compartmentalization on EU climate diplomacy across the international regime complex on climate change

The international governance of climate change no longer takes place in one forum – the UNFCCC – but is spread across a multitude of fora that collectively make-up the International Regime Complex on Climate Change (IRCCC). Actors with leadership ambitions, like the EU, must therefore adapt their climate diplomacy to address the entirety of the IRCCC. While the EU appears increasingly aware of the need to do so, the potential for such comprehensive climate diplomacy seems undercut by the compartmentalization of EU institutional structures involved in coordinating action in the different IRCCC fora. Although IRCCC fora all deal with aspects of the larger climate issue, EU-level activity in each forum is not uniformly synchronised and instead falls under the purview of separate institutional structures. Such arrangements constitute policy-making silos, which, with the exception of cursory, high-level coordination, seem to interact rather sparingly. This paper thus therefore answers the research question: How do EU internal coordination structures affect the extent the EU demonstrates a comprehensive climate diplomacy across the IRCCC? Based on 40 semi-structured interviews with EU, EU member state, and third-state officials, it looks at the impact of EU internal institutional variables on (1) the types and frequency of cross-forum connections that the EU employed and (2) the consistency of its climate-related positions in different fora relating to four climate agreements negotiated from 2015-2018: Paris Agreement (UNFCCC; 2015), Carbon Offsetting Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (ICAO, 2016), Kigali Amendment (Montreal Protocol; 2016), and the Initial Strategy on Reducing GHG Emissions in Shipping (IMO, 2018). This paper contributes not only to a nuanced assessment of the EU as an international climate leader but also provides empirical evidence on the limits of an actor’s ability to use a regime complex to its advantage in the context of a negotiation in one forum.