In this book, Katrin Buchmann offers a fascinating and insightful account of the efforts of several European embassies to create alliances in the United States and in China to support the UN climate negotiations leading up to COP15.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Understanding climate obstruction is foundational to advancing effective action on the global climate crisis. Starting in the late 1980s, a broad range of actors--including corporations and trade associations acting in coordination with conservative think tanks, foundations, and public relations firms--mounted a long-term effort to oppose action to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change. This is the first book to document the development and nature of these activities across Europe. Leading teams of experts examine case studies of eleven nations and the European Union. Each team documents the historic development of climate obstruction in the country, the principal organizations involved in these efforts, the strategies and tactics utilized, and the nature of the arguments made to slow or stop climate action. Noting significant differences between countries, the book concludes with ten lessons on climate obstruction across Europe that emerged from the studies. Future research is suggested to aid in better understanding the development of intentional barriers to action on climate change in Europe.

The European Union's foreign policy and its international role are increasingly being contested both globally and at home. At the global level, a growing number of states are now challenging the Western-led liberal order defended by the EU. Large as well as smaller states are vying for more leeway to act out their own communitarian principles on and approaches to sovereignty, security and economic development. At the European level, a similar battle has begun over principles, values and institutions. The most vocal critics have been anti-globalization movements, developmental NGOs, and populist political parties at both extremes of the left-right political spectrum. This book, based on ten case studies, explores some of the most important current challenges to EU foreign policy norms, whether at the global, glocal or intra-EU level. The case studies cover contestation of the EU's fundamental norms, organizing principles and standardized procedures in relation to the abolition of the death penalty, climate, Responsibility to Protect, peacebuilding, natural resource governance, the International Criminal Court, lethal autonomous weapons systems, trade, the security-development nexus and the use of consensus on foreign policy matters in the European Parliament. The book also theorizes the current norm contestation in terms of the extent to, and conditions under which, the EU foreign policy is being put to the test.

The EU has, for a long time, portrayed itself as an international leader on climate change. Previous studies have tended to focus on the characteristics of EU leadership, but have failed to examine the extent to which EU leadership generates 'followship'. This book analyzes EU climate policies towards China and India in order to provide a holistic assessment of EU climate leadership, and makes three key arguments.

This book closely scrutinizes the individual and collective roles played by China, the EU and the USA in contemporary world politics. Examining the three actors’ respective strategic and policy positions on and behaviour towards the flux of the contemporary global order, the analysis focuses on three major issues and challenges: foreign and security policy; economics and trade; and climate change and energy. Discussing their relative power, as well as their interests, beliefs and positions on a set of decisive issues, this book explores bilateral relations between the three powers and the ways in which they may interact trilaterally in a broader global context to shape international politics. Written by a stellar line-up of experts from the fields of politics and international relations, The Evolving Relationship between China, the EU and the USA will be of huge interest to students and scholars from within these fields, as well as policy-makers and practitioners more generally.

The essential primer for understanding climate diplomacy, describing both the major players and the path to progress, from the 1992 Rio Summit to the 2015 Paris Climate Conference Climate Diplomacy from Rio to Paris is the first accessible overview of climate diplomacy in its first quarter century. The author, who has reported on energy and climate for two decades, provides readers with a nuanced account of the major players and their interests—from the United States, the European Union, and China to environmental organizations, the United Nations, and the Vatican—and analyzes the outcomes of the major climate conferences at Rio, Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Paris.

This book analyses the role of the BASIC countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – in the international climate order. Climate Diplomacy and Emerging Economies explores the collective and individual positions of these countries towards climate diplomacy, focusing in particular on the time period between the 2009 and 2019 climate summits in Copenhagen and Madrid. Dhanasree Jayaram examines the key drivers behind their climate-related policies (both domestic and international) and explores the contributory role of ideational and material factors (and the interaction between them) in shaping the climate diplomacy agenda at multilateral, bilateral and other levels. Digging deeper into the case study of India, Jayaram studies the shifts in its climate diplomacy by looking into the ways in which climate change is framed and analyses the variations in perceptions of the causes of climate change, the solutions to it, the motivations for setting climate action goals, and the methods to achieve the goals. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of climate change, environmental policy and politics and IR more broadly.

Drawing on first hand interview data with experts and government officials, Olivia Gippner develops a new analytical framework to explore the vested interests and policy debates surrounding Chinese climate policy-making.

This book provides a novel theoretical framework to understand EU-China diplomatic relations. The existing scholarly literature on EU-China relations is characterised by a dichotomous distinction between material and ideational factors and overemphasises the ‘interest versus value’ motif undergirding EU-China relations. The diplomacy and future direction of the relationship seem as opaque as their extent remains incalculably complex. This book takes us beyond binary motives by introducing a novel theoretical model of diplomatic relationship-building that brings to the fore the more nuanced and latent factors to make sense of EU-China diplomatic relationship-building; the new theory captures the ‘relational’ nature of diplomatic relationship-building by integrating the social layer of ‘intentions’ in understanding international diplomacy. This study further sheds light on the opportunities and challenges in enhancing EU-China relations, through a comparative in-depth investigation of the processes, practices and politics of EU-China climate change and agricultural-trade relations over the past two decades. The book draws on a rich collection of original data, encompassing over 100 interviews with stakeholders of EU-China relations conducted from 2015–2023; strengthened by participant observation at EU and Chinese institutional headquarters and in diplomatic fora that has taken place over the past ten years. Enriching these data are newly disclosed official minutes and documentation regarding EU-China negotiations and cooperation. This book will be of much interest to students of diplomacy studies, Chinese politics, EU politics and international relations in general.