Paris via Brussels: A three-level game analysis of the EU’s behaviour at the 2015 Paris international climate negotiations (COP21)

Abstract

The EU has been a rare example of a consistent global leadership on climate change. At a time when governments around the world are reluctant to face the challenges of climate change mitigation, the EU was widely praised for helping to push states towards an ambitious Paris Agreement. This thesis asks what influenced the EU’s behaviour at the 2015 Paris international climate negotiations (COP21). To answer this it undertakes an inductive case study of COP21 and the intra-EU negotiations that led up to it. It focuses on the EU’s positions on climate mitigation proposals and more specifically greenhouse gas reductions. The thesis argues that the three-level game, incorporating national, supranational (EU), and international (UNFCCC) negotiating games, is superior to other theoretical frameworks for explaining the EU’s behaviour. It shows that EU member states adopted positions based on political pressures at a national level, but also took into account how they would be received at a supranational level and how they could effect the international negotiations. Ignoring any one of the levels leads to an incomplete analysis of the factors influencing EU climate policy. Throughout the thesis I develop the three-level game, building on Putnam’s two-level game, as a framework for analysing the EU’s behaviour in international climate negotiations and challenge the mainstream, EU-centric explanations for EU climate policy.