Bilateral Climate Cooperation: The EU’s Relations with China and India

Abstract

Scholars of global climate governance have focused increasingly on alternative venues to the UN climate regime, with much attention focusing on the growth of transnational climate governance. This article considers the phenomenon of bilateral intergovernmental climate cooperation. It seeks to understand the development of EU–China and EU–India climate cooperation as possible instances of diffusion of ideas, policies, and institutions. While Chinese and Indian climate policies should be understood as primarily domestic developments, there is some limited evidence of diffusion from the EU to China. Domestic factors in China and India—particularly the degree of fit between externally promoted and pre-existing domestic ideas and frames and the underlying material conditions driving these frames—help to explain the variation between the two cases with respect to observed patterns of diffusion.