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Volume I examines the history of the European Union from an outside-in perspective, asking the following questions: how does the European Union look from the outside, and which outside forces shaped and guided the process of European integration? Split into three parts, the first addresses the main external events that have steered the European int...
Relatively little is known about the precise activities of the European External Action Service (EEAS) headquarters in the European Union’s (EU’s) international climate diplomacy, especially since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015. This article therefore sketches the evolution of the climate diplomacy activities undertaken by EEAS headqua...
International climate governance no longer takes place only in the UNFCCC but is spread across numerous fora that collectively form the international regime complex on climate change. For climate leaders like the EU, the regime complex creates opportunities for strategic activity in its diplomacy across the different fora. This article examines how...
Global governance in many domains is increasingly characterised by the existence of international regime complexes-i.e., sets of overlapping institutional fora taking up different aspects of a broader issue area. As an international actor, the EU faces a context of such international regime complexity. Yet, little is known about how the EU navigate...
The EU participates in many international fora related to climate change (for example UNFCCC, G20, Montreal Protocol), which collectively constitute the international regime complex on climate change (IRCCC). Using the case study of negotiations on the Paris Agreement, this paper addresses the question How and why did the EU use the different fora...
Keukeleire and Delreux demonstrate the scope and diversity of the European Union's foreign policy, showing that EU foreign policy is broader than the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Common Security and Defence Policy, and that areas such as trade, development, environment and energy are inextricable elements of it.
This book offers a co...
Over the past decades, the international governance of climate change has evolved from a singular forum—the UNFCCC—to a larger international regime complex of a variety of fora covering different aspects of the broader climate change issue. The international regime complex on climate change (IRCCC) presents particular challenges and opportunities f...
In April 2018, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) reached agreement on its Initial Strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from international shipping. The Initial Strategy was a success for the EU, as it achieved its long-term objective of reaching an international agreement on greening shipping. However, several factors call into q...
This paper compares how European and non‐European participants in international environmental negotiations perceive the EU's role in such negotiations. Three dimensions of the EU's role (environmental ambition, diplomatic activity and influence) are assessed in three UN‐wide environmental forums (the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm Conventions on ch...
How ambitious, active and influential are countries and regional groups in global environmental negotiations? We construct eight ideal types of their roles based on ambition, activity and influence. We then examine how the roles of countries and regional groups are perceived by participants in these negotiations through a large-scale online survey....
This article traces the origins of European legislation during the legislative policy-making process. It identifies three phases where parts of the text of legislative acts can be developed: (1) agenda-setting; (2) intra-institutional decision-making and (3) interinstitutional negotiations, depending on whether the content of the legislation origin...
This chapter analyses the participation and contribution of the EU to international environmental negotiations. It gives an overview of the EU’s status as a partner in these negotiations and as a party to multilateral environmental agreements. In order to grasp how the EU acts as an negotiator at the international level, it is important to understa...
Principal–agent analyses have been frequently applied by scholars of the European Union (EU). The model helps to explain the reasons, modalities, and consequences of the delegation of authority from one (set of) actor(s)—the principal—to another (set of) actor(s)—the agent. Instances of delegation are omnipresent in the EU: not only is the EU found...
Climate change is a central topic of concern for EU international diplomacy and is the site of increased politicization globally. Concomitantly, a parallel process of parliamentarization of the EU has unfolded. Whilst the European Parliament (EP) has enjoyed significant powers in internal policy-making on climate change, since the entry into force...
The fight against climate change has become a major area of action for the European Union (EU), both at the European and the international level. EU climate policy has gained importance since the 1990s and is today the most politicized issue on the EU’s environmental agenda. The EU is often considered a frontrunner—even a leader—in the adoption of...
This article presents a newly developed ‘deviation index’ to measure, in a quantitative and standardized way, the extent to which the negotiators in trilogues (the rapporteur and the rotating Presidency) deviate from the instructions of the institutions they represent (respectively, the EP and the Council). Based on text-mining techniques, the inde...
In the 20 years after its introduction, the principal-agent model has seen increasing use to study political processes in virtually all policy domains in which the EU is active. Relaxing the strict assumptions that guided the original economic applications has greatly widened the scope for potential applications. This very phenomenon has also creat...
The chapter evaluates and explains the effectiveness of the external action of the EU on forests. Despite its lack of competence on forests, the EU seeks to promote sustainable forest management through various policies and measures. Some are explicitly focused on forests, such as the EU’s participation in the United Nations Forum on Forests, while...
This chapter examines the EU’s overall support for multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) as a key instrument of global environmental governance. It discusses how the EU participates in international negotiation processes in the context of MEAs by investigating the formal provisions as well as the informal practices. This is illustrated with...
On many issues in European Union (EU) foreign policy-making, political steering and operational action are provided by an informal, self-selected group of actors. Although this informal division of labour is an important phenomenon, it has largely escaped the radar of EU foreign policy scholars. This article aims to fill that gap. Applying an induc...
This chapter examines whether the principal–agent model will mature by accommodating the new empirical reality or whether it will become outdated as the practical challenges narrow the researcher’s focus to the simplest of hierarchical relations. We address this question by covering the three main components of the research process. We distinguish...
Given the omnipresence of delegation and control in the EU, the principal–agent model has become a popular analytical framework to study the design and effects of delegation and control. Yet, with the ascendance of governance as a mode of decision-making, the contemporary relevance of the principal–agent model became contested. We argue that the mo...
Applying a principal-agent perspective on trilogue negotiations, this article examines how the rapporteur and the Presidency, as agents of respectively the European Parliament and the Council, are able to reach a deal with their fellow agent while avoiding an involuntary defection among their principals. Despite these intra- and inter-institutional...
The chapter evaluates the European Union’s (EU’s) performance in the United Nations Forum on Forests (UNFF) through a case study of the EU at the 11th session of the UNFF (2015). The EU managed to develop a common position in a consensual way (output performance), as a result of which it negotiated as a unitary actor (outcome performance). The EU’s...
In recent decades, the European Union has developed one of the world's most stringent sets of environmental policies. These policies cover not only the traditional areas of environmental concern, such as fighting pollution and protecting natural resources, but also increasingly salient issues like GMOs and climate change, which affect day-to-day pa...
Observing that national officials who are a member of comitology committees in many cases also participate in expert groups consulted by the Commission while preparing draft implementing acts, this paper asks: How does the use of expert groups by the European Commission in the preparation of implementing acts impact on the comitology process? It is...
Empirically focusing on the European Commission, this paper analyses how issue-specific characteristics of policies influence the authority of organizational sub-units. When the European Commission prepares policy proposals for EU policy-making processes, one ‘lead service’ (DG) is appointed as the responsible service to draft the proposal. However...
This article contends that, in order to understand global affairs, not only crises and conflicts need to be examined, but also long-term processes which result from the competition between structural powers. These structural powers have the potential to set or influence the organizing principles and the rules of the game in other countries and regi...
Belgium is usually considered one of the most ‘pro-European Union’ member states, preferring a strong supranational - And even federal - European Union (EU). This pro-EU orthodoxy can be explained by practical factors, such as the omnipresence of European institutions in Brussels; Belgium’s economy, which is largely export oriented; and its federal...
This chapter presents an overview of how three theoretical approaches - bureaucratic politics, new institutionalism and principal-agent models - have been applied to research on EU foreign policy and what their contribution is to this field. Employing a broad understanding of EU foreign policy, it not only discusses the application of these three t...
This contribution analyses the actorness, cohesiveness and effectiveness of the European Union (EU) in international environmental negotiations and examines the impact of the external context on the relationship between cohesiveness and effectiveness. Based on comparative data of nine international negotiations resulting in a multilateral environme...
This article analyzes the reasons why in 2010 the European Commission proposed a legislative framework on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) that could give some powers back to the Member States. This legislative proposal is puzzling since it moves the centre of decision-making regarding the cultivation of GMOs from the EU level back to the dome...
This authoritative text gives a comprehensive account of the European Union’s foreign policy. Moving beyond the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Common Security and Defence Policy, the authors demonstrate the scope and diversity of the EU’s foreign policy and show how areas such as trade, development, environment and energy are inextricab...
This chapter studies the impact of internal and external institutional reform debates on the EU’s external environmental governance. It examines how the EU positioned itself in discussions on strengthening the institutional framework for environmental governance and sustainable development (the ‘external reform’ debate) and how the entry into force...
L’objectif de cet article est d’analyser l’adapta- tion institutionnelle du parlement fédéral belge à l’intégration européenne. Comment est-il im- pliqué dans la politique européenne et dans les processus décisionnels européens ? Quelles sont les opportunités et limites rencontrées par les parlementaires belges pour être informés, pour tenter d’inf...
The article examines the informal division of labour in the European Union's (EU's) external environmental policy-making. It focuses on informal arrangements in the EU co-ordination and representation processes with regard to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) and international climate negotiations. Whereas the rotating...
This paper examines the role of the rotating Presidency in the external representation of the EU in international
environmental negotiations after the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty. Focussing on two negotiation
sessions under the 2010 Belgian Presidency, the biodiversity negotiations in Nagoya (October 2010) and the
climate change negotiati...
This chapter analyses the interactions between the European Union and global environmental politics. It gives an overview of the EU’s status as a partner in international environmental negotiations and as a party to multilateral environmental agreements. Looking at how the EU functions internally in the context of international environmental negoti...
This chapter analyses the European Union’s (EU) position in the international negotiations leading to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, the first international legally binding agreement on the transboundary movements of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Unlike most of the contributions in this volume, the present chapter does not look at th...
Exploring the added value of principal-agent theory for studying the external relations of the EU, this chapter provides a threefold contribution to the book. First, it focuses on the influence of international institutions on the EU in a specific area, namely the EU’s external relations. Examining the relation between the EU and four separate inte...
This article examines the internal decision-making process in the European Union with regard to the 2007 EU-US Open Skies Agreement. By exploring the principal-agent relation between the European Commission and the member states, it analyses the constraints and opportunities the Commission faced in avoiding an involuntary defection. Based on interv...
Delreux examines how the EU functions when it participates in international environmental negotiations. In particular, this book looks at the internal EU decision-making process with regard to international negotiations that lead to multilateral environmental agreements. By studying eight such decision-making processes, the book analyses how much n...
This article examines why and how agents weaken the incentives to control of their principals when the EU negotiates international agreements. Based on analyses of various EU decision-making processes on international trade and environmental agreements, this article argues that the EU negotiator-as-agent has a number of tools to affect the cost-ben...
This article sheds a light on the role of the EU in environmental negotiations that are held under the auspices of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE). In particular, the EU decision-making processes with regard to the negotiations leading to the Aarhus Convention and to the SEA Protocol are examined. Based on extensive docume...
Starting from principal–agent theory, this article analyses the conditions under which an EU negotiator enjoys a particular degree of discretion vis-à-vis the member states during international environmental negotiations. A qualitative comparative analysis of eight EU decision-making processes with regard to international negotiations leading to a...
This article examines the internal decision-making process in the European Union when the EU participates in international environmental negotiations. More particularly, the practical functioning of the relation between the member states and the EU negotiator (i.e. the Commission, the Presidency or a lead country), representing the member states ex...
This article focuses on the way the European Union acted as a negotiating party during the international negotiations leading to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (1998–2000). Starting from a principal–agent model, the article discusses how the EU participated in these negotiations and how the internal decision-making proces...
This article focuses on the way the EU operates in negotiations leading to an international agreement, which touches upon competences shared between the EC and the member states. More specifically, the article addresses the EU decision-making process and the EU negotiation arrangement with regard to multilateral chemicals conventions. A principal–a...
In international environmental negotiations, the member states of the European Union (EU) are often represented by an EU negotiator (the Commission, the Council Presidency, or a lead country), who negotiates on their behalf. That is why the delegation of negotiation authority from the member states to the EU negotiator takes a central place in the...
From an EU point of view, most international environmental agreements are mixed. This means that both the European Community (EC) and its member states are party to the agreement. As the participation of the EC in international negotiations and agreements is properly arranged by the Treaty establishing the European Community, but the EU member stat...
On 13 June 2004, 6,857,986 voters elected 24 MEPs. Belgium is one of the few EU countries – beside Luxembourg and Greece – where voting is obligatory, which explains the relative high turnout of 90.8 per cent. Belgium is a federal state where regional parliaments are elected on the same day as the EP, so new representatives for the regional parliam...
This article analyses the genesis of formal procedures and institutional conditions within the agriculture policy domain in federal Belgium. Our process tracing star ts in 1988 when a small number of agriculture competencies were handed over to the regions and ends in 2002 with the almost complete de-federalisation of agriculture. In par ticular we...
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The Jean Monnet network on EU-UN relations is working on a report on the state-of-the-art of EU-UN studies. This report will include information on academic practices and teaching methodologies used in the field. We believe that educational activities can profit from the exchange of teaching and training best-practices and the development of new supporting tools. You can contribute by sending relevant information. In return you will be kept informed of the project output (i.e. possible content and material created to support teaching activities on EU-UN relations).
