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As Time Goes by: EU Climate Change Actorness from Rio to Copenhagen. Bruges Regional Integration & Global Governance Paper 3/2011, September 2011

Heidener, Uldall and James, Thomas (2011) As Time Goes by: EU Climate Change Actorness from Rio to Copenhagen. Bruges Regional Integration & Global Governance Paper 3/2011, September 2011. [Working Paper]

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    Abstract

    During the past two decades the European Union (EU) has increasingly come to be recognised as an important international actor in environmental politics. The failure of the EU to instigate an ambitious post-2012 environmental framework agreement at the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen in 2009 may, however, signal a change in the EU’s status as an international climate change actor. It raises the question of which conditions allowed the EU to be an actor in the first place. Drawing on the theoretical concept of actorness, the paper analyses the conditions for EU actorness in the area of climate change. It will be argued that for the EU to be an actor, all four criteria of actorness – recognition, authority, cohesion and autonomy – need to be present. While these criteria were present at the 1992 Rio Summit and the COP3 in Kyoto in 1997, a lack of autonomy and cohesion prevented the EU from being an international actor in Copenhagen.

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    Item Type: Working Paper
    Additional Information: Joint working paper series of the EU International Relations and Diplomacy Studies Department at the College of Europe and the Comparative Regional Integration Studies of the United Nations University, Bruges.
    Subjects for non-EU documents: EU policies and themes > Policies & related activities > environmental policy (including international arena)
    Other international institutions > UN
    Subjects for EU documents: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Series and Periodicals: UNSPECIFIED
    EU Annual Reports: UNSPECIFIED
    Series: Series > College of Europe (Brugge) > Bruges Regional Integration & Global Governance (BRIGG) Papers
    Depositing User: Ms Léonie Maes
    Official EU Document: No
    Language: English
    Date Deposited: 03 May 2012 14:04
    Number of Pages: 34
    Last Modified: 03 May 2012 14:04
    URI: http://aei.pitt.edu/id/eprint/33543

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