EU climate leadership necessitates a coercive transactional framework in which the EU pretends to care about environmental sustainability in the Global South while instead focusing on greater commercialized opportunities for their own benefit – decks solvency and indicts their motivations

While it has received most attention for its leadership and commitment in the international climate negotiations (Wurzel and Connelly 2011a), the EU also has become a crucial actor when it comes to tackling climate change in developing countries and emerging economies (Adelle et al. 2018b; Jerpstad 2019; Torney et al. 2018). On the one hand, the motives for stepping up its external engagement are linked to climate justice considerations and to the international climate regime. Thus, the EU from early on accepted the historical responsibility of industrialised countries for climate change (EU Commission 1991: 2; EU Commission 1988: 35) – formalised by the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibility (CBDR) in the UNFCCC – which, besides decisive mitigation, also compelled it to support developing countries. However, especially since the mid-2000s, the EU also has increasingly began to argue for the need to overcome the clear-cut threshold between ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries embodied in the CBDR. In this vein, it has emphasised the growing responsibilities of powerful emerging economies when it comes to fighting underdevelopment and mitigating climate change (Jerpstad 2019: 74–75, 77). The EU thus departed from exclusively looking at historical responsibilities and realised that climate change could hardly be fought without including the Global South and especially large emerging economies, which, however, would not act without substantive support (Adelle et al. 2018b: 82; Peskett et al. 2009: 6–7). Finally, the EU has increasingly assumed a role as mediator between industrialised and developing countries, which has led some to conceptualise it as a ‘leadiator’ (Bäckstrand and Elgström 2013), and which also has furthered its interest in cooperating with actors from the Global South (Torney and Cross 2018; Walker 2018). On the other hand, there are also less altruistic drivers for the EU’s increasing interest in climate policies in developing countries. Important examples are increased NGO pressure to ‘climate proof’ its development activities (Colebourn 2011: 6) and the desire to further exercise and showcase the EU’s normative power and to create commercial opportunities through the promotion of green economy projects in the Global South (Barnes 2011: 51; van Schaik and Schunz 2012; Wurzel and Connelly 2011b: 9). The starting point of the EU’s external climate-development policies was the 1997 Amsterdam Treaty. Together with the increasing importance of ‘sustainable development’ and the Cardiff Process (EU Commission 1998; Roeck 2018: 13), this subsequently led to an integration of environmental issues in the European Community’s Development Policy and later the 2005 Consensus on Development (Adelle et al. 2018b: 82–83; Peskett et al. 2009: 5). The issue gathered particular momentum with the 2004 Action Plan on Climate Change in the Context of Development Cooperation (Council of the EU 2004), which substantiated the EU’s activities in this sector and kick-started the mainstreaming of climate change into all EU development activities. Besides the 2007 Adaptation Green Paper (Peskett et al. 2009: 8), this process also led to a number of bilateral cooperation agreements with large emerging economies including the China, India, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea and later also Mexico (EU Commission 2010: 8–9). Another explanation for bringing together the EU’s climate and development activities was the construction of climate change as a security issue, which primarily forecasted developing countries to be affected by the security implication of climate change (Solana and EU Commission 2008: 2, 4). Key reports and developments in this area were the 2008 report on Climate Change and International Security (Solana and EU Commission 2008), the integration of climate change into the European Security Strategy, and the discussion of its security implications in the Foreign Affairs Council (EU Commission 2010: 9). Finally, the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in 2015, which explicitly included the fight against climate change (UN 2015: 5, 18), further strengthened the links between climate and development in the EU strategy (Roeck 2018: 7). Besides integrating climate change into its foreign and security policy, existing development programmes and the European Neighbourhood Policy, the EU established several thematic programmes to deal with climate change in other countries. From 2007 to 2013 these issues were partly covered by the Environment and Sustainable Management of Natural Resources including Energy Thematic Programme (ENRTP) (Adelle et al. 2018b: 87). Another key programme is the Global Public Goods and Challenge Programme (GPGC), which for the current period (2014–2020) devotes about 600 million euro to facilitate ‘resilient’, ‘low carbon societies’ (EU Commission 2014: 3) and is also linked to the Climate Change Mitigation-Supporting Low-Carbon Development Flagship Initiative (Adelle et al. 2018b: 87). In addition, although having a broader focus, some aspects of the 2009 Climate Change and Energy Package and the European Emission Trading System (ETS) are relevant for the EU’s climate development co-operation (Peskett et al. 2009: 9–10). Finally, in 2007, the EU established the Global Climate Change Alliance (GCCA). The initiative has been led by the newly created Directorate General for International Cooperation and Development (DG DEVCO) since 2011 and has become the centrepiece of the EU’s climate-development instruments. After a slow start, the GCCA added more target countries and in 2014 became a so called ‘flagship initiative’. After the Paris Agreement in 2015, it was expanded and renamed GCCA+. The GCCA+ now facilitates cooperation with over 70 countries and, since 2017, also includes mitigation projects (GCCA+ 2018a, 2018b). The core mission of the GCCA+ is to ‘support[s] those developing countries which are most vulnerable to climate change in implementing their national commitments’ (GCCA+ 2018b), which includes National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) and since the 2015 Paris Agreement also Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).