Strengthening EU climate leadership posits the EU as the “leader and savior” of “endangered” populations while ignoring the main perpetrators and damaging practices that drive climate change – turns case and causes dehumanization

The EU climate-development policies further a specific set of identities both for the EU itself and for the target countries, which is directly connected to the visibility of climate change as a global risk with mostly local impacts. At its core is the dichotomy between locally-bound, vulnerable Southern populations and the climate savvy and internationally well connected actors from the Global North – here predominantly represented by the EU. This differentiation is connected to both governmental and disciplinary power. Here, once again normation i.e. the differentiation between the artificially created ideal typical norm (climate resilient citizens of the Global North) and the deviation (vulnerable, Southern populations) and normalisation come into play. Both of these concepts ultimately constitute the EU as the active, powerful and knowledgeable actor who belongs to the global elite, while local populations become passive, and in relation to climate change and its risks, not sufficiently educated and adapted victims. Thus, the analysed documents agree that climate change will hit the poorest countries and people first and hardest (EU Commission 2010: 6; GCCA 2012: 2, 5; GCCA+ 2015: 6). This diagnosis is based both on geographical location (GCCA+ 2015: 3) but, more importantly, also on insufficient coping capacity and resilience of people in developing countries, which goes back to inadequate political and economic development (GCCA 2012: 2, 5, 13, 30). This is even more true for the LDCs and SIDS, which, according to the GCCA ‘often have fragile economies and face a range of different challenges with limited capacities to address them.’ (GCCA 2012: 13). Moreover, it rests on a lack of crucial knowledge and technologies to identify and withstand climate risks: ‘But even developing countries with more diversified economies are vulnerable, since the lack of financial resources, adequate technology and effective institutions limits their capacity to adapt to the consequences of climate change’ (European Commission 2010: 6). Against this depiction of developing countries, the EU is constituted as a climate ‘leader’ (GCCA 2012: 5) and ideal saviour that embodies and implements the international support (GCCA+ 2015: 10) for the countries and people in need (EU Commission 2010: 4, 5): The EU is in a unique position to help developing countries respond to the effects of climate change, given its leading role in development, global climate policy, the wide array of tools and instruments at its disposal, and its extensive presence in the developing world. This narrative is underlined by mentioning that the EU is already spending large amounts of money on climate development aid e.g. in the context of the Fast Start Finance and is the world’s biggest provider of Official Development Assistance (ODA) (EU Commission 2010: 5). Thus, it becomes very clear who has the agency and knowledge and who has to be transformed. At the same time, while occasionally referring to the heightened responsibility of Northern countries including the EU (EU Commission 2010: 6, 13), this identity construction does not call out the main perpetrators and damaging practices when it comes to climate change. Hence, it largely avoids mentioning that in order to tackle the root causes of the problem, the answer is neither adaptation, low emission growth in the South or development cooperation, but first of all radical change at home. This divide between the active and international EU and the passive, local development actors is reinforced by the increasingly complicated array of climate abatement measures. Thus, the deployment of the different risk management schemes, market instruments and connected emission monitoring and verification schemes necessitate a specific kind of expertise and technology. And while local knowledge plays some role in the refinement of these schemes (Council of the EU 2004: 14), this expertise is mostly to be found in the hands of ‘carbon professionals’ from the EU, international organisations and NGOs (Methmann 2011: 84). In the words of a central report on climate change and development cooperation, it is about ‘using southern based knowledge and northern innovations’ (Council of the EU 2004: 14). This differentiation in terms of who has the knowledge and who is constituted as sender/recipient of expertise can become problematic, as CDM measures such as renewable energy projects often clash with the priorities of the local population, yet due to the lead and specific form of expertise of experts from the outside, cannot be adequately adapted to these circumstances (Methmann 2011: 84).