Impact of Eurozone Crisis on EU Climate Change Leadership Through the Lens of Multi-Level Governance

Abstract

Climate change is without question one of the biggest challenges that the world has faced. Yet, solving this collective action problem has made slow progress in international negotiation. In coping with this complex climate change problem, effective leadership often plays a critical role and the European Union has developed into a successful leader in international climate politics despite its seemingly structural deficiency with multi-level governance. However, since the sovereign debt crisis in the Euro area occurred in late 2009, many are worried if global climate regime would lose the biggest leader. Since the EU remains as the only influential leader in global climate change politics, whether even the EU will step back from the climate leadership position in the face of economic crisis, therefore, became a burning question. Due to its symbolic importance, this study intends to answer the question why and how does the EUs economic crisis affect on EUs climate change leadership? First of all, this paper explains the factors of the EUs successful leadership in climate change politics from an actor-focused perspective, and goes through what has happened in the factors after the Eurozone crisis started. Finally, it made a conclusion on the impact of the Eurozone crisis on the EUs climate leadership by taking all the changes of the successful factors into consideration. Briefly, this study has found that the Eurozone crisis has diverged EU not only in its economic situation, but also in climate policy making, and that the crisis has both directly and indirectly hampered EUs leadership in international climate politics. However, it is noteworthy that the analysis of this study is only limited to the changes inside Europe after the Eurozone crisis broke out, and thus, additional studies will be needed on other candidate countries for climate leader such as the US and China in order to diagnose EU climate leadership in a right way because EUs leadership position depends not only on the EUs climate change initiatives but also on behaviors of other competitive actors in the regime.