Conference Program

Among the different approaches to building EU actorness, most have at least two main aspects in common: (1) the Regional Organization’s quest for regional and external recognition as a global actor and (2) its efforts to negotiate, shape, and export its regional policies to other spaces, specially through its normative leadership in selected agendas. Both aspects are related to a widely accepted understanding of the EU as a Regional Organization. This has been built based on its internal development and capacity to work towards consensus, as well as on its external ability to influence and export values, culture, or social practices. Environmental policies and fighting climate change are key issues not only for the EU regional proactive policies and values’ promotion, but also wherever the EU expresses its ambition for “global leadership” (Çelik, 2022; Lenschow, 2020) and acts as a “regulatory superpower” (Bradford, 2020) in its contribution to shape the contemporary international order.

This article states the EU acts as a strong entrepreneur of climate and environmental policies in the region and externalizes its ambitions at other institutional configurations. The aim is to assess this entrepreneurship through a thorough mapping of EU’s proactive role both internally, and in regional regimes and cooperation initiatives at global level. The mapping starts at the end of the 1980’s, with the consolidation of the European Single Market, until recent events in 2023.

Climate change is one of the most essential threats to the international system in today’s world. Due to this crisis, intergovernmental organizations, as well as states, have begun to transform and create their environmental policies in accordance with the effects of climate change. Among many security challenges that the European Union (EU) has faced over the last couple of decades, such as economic instabilities, refugee crises, terrorism, energy shortages, etc., the Union is also threatened by the emergency of climate change. It directed the EU to create policies, such as the European Green Deal. However, with growing attention on how to develop effective climate policy, the potential development of norms against fossil fuels, or Anti-Fossil Fuel Norms (AFFNs), has emerged as a promising new research agenda. Hence, the main research question of this study is how the EU develops norms against fossil fuels to support its climate policies effectively between 2015 and 2023. Understanding the mechanisms and conditions by which such norms are developed and secured in the EU is significant. This study contributes to focusing on this by analyzing the case of the EU as an international intergovernmental organization examining the emergence of norms against fossil fuels. Content analysis will be used to understand the possibility of a climate norm cascade. As a climate leadership, the EU’s role in climate norm cascade in the context of AFFN will provide to understand of how norm changes can be another essential tool to shape the contemporary international order.

Kerala, the South Western State in India, has been a victim of the regular occurrence of natural calamities like floods and landslides for quite some time due to unscrupulous human interventions in the biodiversity of Western Ghats (WG). To understand how Kerala manages biodiversity in the WG, the study applied the theoretical framework of the Multi-Level Governance (MLG). MLG is concerned with analyzing decision-making power shifts from the Central Government to other non-governmental stakeholders in an upward, downward, and sideway direction. Using this concept to evaluate how government and non-government entities, and civil society groups manage WG's biodiversity at various levels, both vertically and horizontally. This study empirically analyses the MLG mechanism in biodiversity management, providing insight into the sustainable development strategies of emerging economies like India. The study used a comparative case study technique to understand the effects of biodiversity management by various stakeholders like government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and intergovernmental entities across five villages from WG regions of Kerala. MLG analysis in environmental governance is guided by the understanding that vertical and horizontal differences in the cooperation of various stakeholders may depict complex solutions that work in a particular context but cannot be precisely transferred to another context. Only the collaboration of stakeholders within and outside levels and from different social sectors can ensure access to the necessary resources and effective implementation at the grassroots level. The research establishes that while Kerala's biodiversity governance has primarily developed as a bottom-up approach, India follows a top-down approach predominantly.