In late 2019, the European Union (EU) presented its new grand strategy to become the first climate-neutral continent: the European Green Deal (EGD). Considering its ambitious goals, the EGD covers a wide variety of policies including climate and environmental policies as well as transport, taxation, energy, agricultural policies and many more. The implementation of the EGD is however not just a matter of EU-internal policy making, but it also includes an external dimension. As such, the implementation of the external dimension - as called for in the 2021 Foreign Affairs Council (FAC) conclusions - speaks to existing EU climate and energy diplomacy ambitions, regularly formulated by the FAC since 2011 and 2015.

This paper studies the implementation of the external dimension of the EGD by studying the activities and messages of EU Delegations, the EU’s more than 140 diplomatic offices around the world. EU diplomats build relations with third countries, they implement outreach activities, as well as develop and monitor projects. In doing so, they contribute to the EU’s diplomatic outreach in a continuous fashion, next to the EU’s role at international negotiations and in summit diplomacy. Previous research has already illustrated the role of EU Delegations as relevant actors in implementing climate diplomacy outreach ahead of COP21 in 2015 (Biedenkopf & Petri 2019).

With the introduction of the EGD, the demands of sectoral diplomatic outreach on issue areas related to the Green Deal have increased. EU diplomats are thus faced with a more diverse set of instructions to address climate change across the board of outreach activities (sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, etc.). Building on 66 interviews with EU diplomats across world regions (asking about their climate/energy/Green Deal-related outreach), this paper uses qualitative content analysis to study the cross-sectoral nature of Delegations’ diplomatic outreach and identifies types of diplomatic messages spread to project EU ambitions in this field. Based on this, the paper discusses synergies and challenges to EU Delegations’ cross-sectoral outreach on an emerging Green Deal diplomacy.

Reaching the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change requires increasingly ambitious and transformative policy responses. A key aspect of climate governance is procedural governance that supports the creation and modification of the policy instruments that directly reduce emissions. While academic attention to these issues is increasing, the literature continues to lack a synthesis of these concepts to aid with cumulative knowledge generation. In this article, we seek to address this gap by presenting a framework to categorize and analyze climate-related procedural governance. This framework is organized around governance functions – such as providing expert advice and integrating public participation – which can be used to categorize relevant instruments, laws, and organizations. We then use that framework to inform a review of academic and grey literature on procedural governance in the European Union, a global leader in the policy response to climate change. We find uneven focus across the governance areas, with monitoring/evaluation and public participation standing out in the academic literature, and planning as well as overall governance approaches existing in the grey literature.

The Circular Economy package is an integral part of EU environmental policy since 2015. At first glance, the main aim of the package is to achieve resource efficiency before the environmental problem of resource scarcity. However, under a closer look of the package, resource scarcity is not the only environmental problem addressed through a CE. If markets of secondary raw materials have to replace the markets of primary raw materials, secondary materials should be safe for humans and the environment. Therefore, the EU’s CE package is as much about resource efficiency as it is about pollution control. According to the Commission, an effective CE regulation is one that conceives resource efficiency and pollution control as two interdependent aims, promoted through integrated legal and policy measures. This integrated relationship promoted by the Commission is aligned with legal scholarship promoting a system-thinking approach towards environmental law and governance. Against this policy and theoretical backdrop, the presentation proposes an assessment framework for EU law on CE. If CE regulation is more effective under an integrated approach of pollution control and resource efficiency measures, does EU law on CE demonstrate an integration of pollution control and resource efficiency rules? To conduct this assessment, I am relying on EU waste and product laws as the two pools of data relevant for an EU law on CE. The assessment targets certain regulatory venues in EU waste and product law, where the interaction of resource efficiency and pollution control rules is particularly salient.

The UK’s vote to leave the European Union (EU), Brexit, has prompted lively debates in the literature about what this decision means for our understanding of Europeanisation processes in general, but also for specific policy domains. It is widely accepted in the literature that processes of Europeanisation have led to a patchwork of regulatory rules that differ in density and effect depending upon the policy areas to which they apply. It follows that leaving the EU will lead to similarly patchy unstitching with differential effects across and within policy domains. This paper seeks to make sense of when, where and how de-Europeanisation can occur by analysing the impact of Brexit on UK environmental policy. It proceeds by testing a set of theoretical expectations derived from the literatures on de-Europeanisation, the Brussels effect and policy dismantling against three case studies to determine the conditions shaping attempts to de-Europeanise UK environmental policy. The paper contributes empirically by testing claims made by the UK government about the delivery of Green Brexit. It also has wider implications for theories of (de)Europeanisation.