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The European Union in global environmental governance: Leadership in the making?

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics volume 7, pages 389–413 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

For well over a decade, the European Union (EU) has proclaimed its leadership role in global environmental governance (GEG). In this article, we examine both the nature of its leadership and the underlying conditions for ‘actorness’ upon which leadership must depend. The EU’s record in the global conferences as well as its influence on the reform of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) are also investigated. We argue that the EU has frequently sought to shape international environmental negotiations and promote sustainable development as an organising principle of global governance. Despite its inadequate status at the UN and internal problems, it has had a significant effect on the global agenda. However, due to persistent diplomatic opposition from other coalitions, its real, directly visible influence has been more modest. For genuine directional leadership, which goes beyond the defence of self-interest, the Union will have to make internal policy coherence a greater priority. Moreover, apart from relying solely on its weighty presence in the international system or its potential capabilities, the EU needs to achieve a high level of credibility in order to enhance its powers of persuasion.

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Notes

  1. There has been lively debate on the question of EU identity and the extent to which it has been constructed as an alternative to US hegemony or merely as the reciprocal of military weakness. See, for example, Kagan (2003), Rifkin (2004), and Bretherton and Vogler (2006), Chapter 2.

  2. See Skodvin and Andresen (2006) for further elaboration of the leadership concept.

  3. The three concepts are derived from Bretherton and Vogler (2006).

  4. The TEU, Treaty on European Union, was agreed at Maastricht in 1992, while the incorporation of sustainable development as a Community objective was achieved by the revision of the TEC, treaty establishing the EC, at Amsterdam in 1997.

  5. This again reflects internal problems with attempts to introduce sustainability requirements into the Union’s many activities through the Cardiff Process and more recently the Sustainable Development Strategy.

  6. Since 1993, commentators have usually referred to the EU—encompassing both the EC (Pillar I of the structure agreed at Maastricht in 1992) and the Member States. However, in discussing the external role of the Union it is sometimes necessary to make the legal distinction between the Community which has its own competencies, is represented by the Commission and has international legal personality and the EU as a whole. At the UN, the distinction between the Community, which only has observer status, and the Member States who attempt to co-ordinate their actions as members of the EU, is particularly important.

  7. The Community was granted the right to take over the making of external policy from the Member States in specified areas by the TEC (see Arts. 133, 300). Elsewhere, and in the case of most environmental policy, it automatically acquired external competence when internal competence was granted. This was established by the European Court of Justice in ECJ 22/70, the European Road Transport Agreement case.

  8. For further details on the extent and modes of EU participation, see Vogler (2003). Of the 79 agreements listed in the 2003–2004 Yearbook of International Cooperation on Environment and Development, the Community was a signatory of 39 in its own right with the Member States representing the Union in a number of others such as CITES, the ocean dumping conventions and MARPOL.

  9. UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (2007). Group membership is important because they form the constituencies from which states are elected to serve on various UN bodies including ECOSOC, CSD and UNEP. Also selected on a group basis are the bureaux which have a continuing administrative role when conferences or commissions are not in session.

  10. Although the same formula was used for EC participation in subsequent UN conferences on Habitat, Health and Environment and the Food Summit of 1996, it took 3 weeks of preparatory discussion to insert it into the documentation of the UN General Assembly Special Session which reviewed UNCED in June 1997 (Vogler 1999, p. 34).

  11. Delors did attend but was prevented from speaking at the UNCED final Plenary. As the leaders departed he, perhaps symbolically, found it necessary to hitch a ride on French President Mitterrand’s Concorde.

  12. In this instance, the problem was one of coherence within the Commission where the trade DG tended to over-rule environment on the grounds that such matters should be dealt with under the GATT Uruguay Round which should not be complicated by the proceedings at UNCED (Interview Commission 2006).

  13. Carlo Ripa di Meana, ‘Why I will stay away from the Earth Summit’ Guardian, 30 May 1992. The principal reason appears to have been the failure of the Member States to agree on a proposal for carbon taxation.

  14. Its preparation for the summit was meticulous, though not without fault. A stream of different Council conclusions, Commission communications and overarching pronouncements from the European Council accompanied the countdown to Johannesburg.

  15. This did indeed happen at the WSSD: the EU assembled a coalition for renewable energy which did not impose any stringent conditions and hence attracted a good number of signatories.

  16. Following the recognition of the Millennium Development Targets (MDGs) as a new master frame for sustainable development and the ongoing efforts of the WTO’s Doha Development Agenda (DDA), Johannesburg’s focus was plainly on poverty eradication (Bigg 2003). This significantly reduced DG Environment’s room for manoeuvre and opportunities for influence.

  17. As Marsh (2005, p. 145) points out, “Recent years have seen environmental issues become a more prominent, recurring and frequently contentious agenda item in the transatlantic relationship.”

  18. ECOSOC has for decades been on the sidelines of the UN system, even though it had originally been intended to be at the core of it—together with the General Assembly.

  19. In 2001, a Southern delegate deplored that—after 10 years of negotiation—delegates were still not able to agree on “a satisfactory definition of sustainable development” (ENB 2001c, p. 12). Given its notoriously ambiguous meaning and political usefulness, this should not have come as a surprise.

  20. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Division for Sustainable Development, Record of CSD Members and Bureau (1993–2006), http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/csd/csdolmem.htm

  21. This agenda was later complemented by a common Northern appeal for ‘good governance’ to ensure the effective spending of money, the respect for human rights, and a certain measure of transparency (ENB 2005, p. 4).

  22. Environmental ministries and the EU’s DG Environment are not in control of the central budgets. Their priorities, despite the EU’s official Rio commitments, were way down the list of finance ministries.

  23. Directional leadership, in the case, would refer to the EU demonstrating the feasibility of alternative, sustainable solutions to common problems and perhaps backing this up with domestic examples, technical expertise, and funding proposals.

  24. This was at the expense of what some called the “New York mafia” (ENB 2001c, p. 12) of seasoned diplomats with little grasp of or interest in matters of practical implementation.

  25. It recommended a “focus on the practical/technical level”, a “high level segment every second year”, a limited thematic work programme, targets and indicators, the exchange of practical experiences regarding the implementation of Agenda 21 and further “development of multi-stakeholder dialogue”.

  26. In contrast to what some may have assumed at the time of UNCED, sustainable development does not replace the environment as political priority—it rather presupposes the latter in order to function properly.

  27. Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden and the UK from the West European Group and Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania from the East European Group.

  28. Because the EC is not a member of the UN it is not eligible to contribute to the UNEP Environment Fund in the way that Member States do. In aggregate, the latter contribute in excess of $40 million p.a. to an Environment Fund of around $60 million (UNEP 2007). In fact, the total spending of UNEP is several times this figure because of the importance of other funds to which the Community does contribute. These include the UNEP Trust Funds and in particular the funding for MEAs. The Commission also contributes to UNEP-sponsored MEAs as a party through assessed subscriptions and through additional voluntary funding. It furthermore makes ‘earmarked contributions’ to UNEP activities, for example on chemicals policy and on sustainable consumption and production. UNEP itself regularly participates in Commission tenders and has won a significant number of environmentally related contracts. The Community is considering the establishment of a multi-annual framework partnership with UNEP, designed to avoid ad-hoc bilateral discussions and diminish reporting requirements (information obtained from DG Environment, December 2006).

  29. Some observers argued that the UNCED mandate reaffirmed UNEP as the main environmental organisation and gave it more responsibilities than ever before (Timoshenko and Berman 1996, p. 45). Yet, whereas political attention focused on the newly created CSD and developing countries grew increasingly restless in the face of Northern refusal to honour financial promises, UNEP was additionally burdened by a wavering leadership. By the time of UNGASS, it had been labelled as largely irrelevant (ENB 1999, p. 11).

  30. However, like in the case of the CSD, the Union is not ready to discard this instrument. Seeing it as part of an overarching framework of GEG reform, a more powerful EMG, backed up with a mandate from the GMEF, could address issues in need of horizontal coordination and even instruct the United Nations Development Group (UNDG) (EU Speaking Points 2006b).

  31. The Environment Council (Conclusions from 7 June 2001) ventured even further by submitting that the gradual adaptation of UNEP “could ultimately lead to a World Environment Organisation, respecting existing headquarters”.

  32. The US was also mildly in favour of this idea, for it counted on the GMEF to reign in the bureaucratic power of UNEP officials (Rosendal, this volume).

  33. The group met six times in total and held its last meeting at the seventh Special Session of the GC in February 2002. The negotiations witnessed an eventual polarisation of positions, with the EU tending to change the focus of its reform proposals when it met an insurmountable impasse.

  34. At the heart of US opposition was a straightforward rejection of greater codification and coherence which might eventually lead to regimes of monitoring and compliance or pose a threat to the WTO trading order by engaging in regulatory competition with it.

  35. The G77 supported a moderate strengthening of UNEP, including greater financial resources and better coordination of MEAs (ENB 2001d). Nonetheless, G77 also insisted on keeping the GMEF dependent on the GC and resisted any move towards a specialised agency (UNEO) or WEO.

  36. The European Council in June 2005 proposed to initiate a process of institutional reform “which will lead to negotiations on the establishment of a UN agency for the environment” that, equipped with adequate funding and equal status to other specialised agencies, would help to mainstream the environmental dimension of sustainable development more effectively and consistently (European Council 2005, p. 11).

  37. These efforts, however, were clearly part of an incremental strategy that aimed at obtaining realistic concessions from negotiating partners who were unlikely to sign up to a UNEO. Universal GC membership, as the round table document timidly mentioned, would “provide an additional impetus for reform of the governance structure” (Ecologic Round Table 2004, p. 3) and hence represent a first step forward.

  38. It also “had the undisputable value of injecting for the first time environmental issues into the security dialogue, specifically focusing on climate change” (Morgera 2006, p. 17)—two innovations that chime very well with the Union’s own new discourse on security.

  39. In a ‘constructivist’ fashion, the ENB (2005, p. 10) explains this through the growing importance of the GMEF’s “soft law statements”. And it is perhaps the European Council that served the EU as a model for its preferred, strengthened version of the GMEF.

  40. Typically, Nordic meetings including Norway precede EU co-ordination meetings. When asked about the influence of the Nordic group, a Commission official responded: ‘we are not supposed to know about that!’ (Interview Commission 2006).

Abbreviations

ACP:

African, Caribbean and Pacific countries

CFSP:

Common foreign and security policy

CSD:

Commission for sustainable development

DDA:

WTO’s Doha Development Agenda

EC:

European Community

EMG:

Environment Management Group

EU:

European Union

FAO:

Food and Agriculture Organisation

G77:

The Group of 77 at the United Nations

GC:

UNEP Governing Council

GEF:

Global Environment Facility

GEG:

Global environmental governance

GMEF:

Global Ministerial Environmental Forum

JPI:

Johannesburg Plan of Implementation

LRTAP:

1979 Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution Convention

MDGs:

Millennium Development Goals

MEAs:

Multilateral environmental agreements

ODA:

Official development assistance

PIC:

Prior informed consent

POPs:

Persistent organic pollutants

REIO:

Regional Economic Integration Organisation

TEC:

Treaty Establishing the European Community

TEU:

Treaty on European Union

UNCED:

UN Conference on Environment and Development, Rio 1992

UNCED+5:

Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly in June 1997

UNCHE:

UN Conference on the Human Environment, Stockholm 1972

UNDG:

United Nations Development Group

UNECE:

United Nations Economic Commission for Europe

UNEO:

United Nations Environment Organisation

UNEP:

United Nations Environment Programme

WEO:

World Environment Organisation

WEOG:

Western Europe and Others Group

WSSD:

World Summit on Sustainable Development, Johannesburg 2002

WTO:

World Trade Organization

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  1. Keele University, SPIRE, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, UK

    John Vogler & Hannes R. Stephan

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Vogler, J., Stephan, H.R. The European Union in global environmental governance: Leadership in the making?. Int Environ Agreements 7, 389–413 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-007-9051-5

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Keywords

  • Actorness
  • Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD)
  • Europe as a global actor
  • Global environmental governance (GEG)
  • Leadership
  • UNEP
  • United Nations reform