Climate change and EU foreign policy: The negotiation of burden sharing

The European Union has established itself as the leader of attempts to construct a global climate change regime. This has become an important normative stance, part of its self-image and international identity. Yet it has also come to depend on the Union's ability to negotiate internally on the distribution of the burdens necessitated by its external pledges to cut emissions. The paper considers institutionalist hypotheses on cooperative bargaining and normative entrapment in EU internal negotiations before the 1997 Kyoto Protocol negotiations and the more recent approach to negotiations on a post-2012 regime. It finds that there is evidence to support the normative entrapment hypothesis in both cases, but that agreement in 1997 was facilitated by a very favourable context associated with a 1990 baseline. International Politics (2009) 46, 469-490. doi: 10.1057/ip.2009.9