Multi-Level Reinforcement: Explaining European Union Leadership in Climate Change Mitigation

Miranda A. Schreurs and Yves Tiberghien

Global Environmental Politics, 2007, vol. 7, issue 4, 19-46

Abstract: The European Union has played a leading role in pushing for the establishment, ratification, and meaningful implementation of the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, although it still has significant efforts to make to achieve its target of an 8 percent cut of greenhouse gas by 2008-2012 relative to the 1990 level. This article explores the political factors behind continued EU leadership in climate change. It argues that a few individual states (including Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, and the UK) played an essential role in establishing the EU's agenda in this domain. However, the decentralized governance structure of the EU has also encouraged a process of mutual reinforcement, whereby individual states, the European Commission, and the European Parliament are competing for leadership. (c) 2007 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Date: 2007
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (61)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/glep.2007.7.4.19 link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:glenvp:v:7:y:2007:i:4:p:19-46

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1526-3800

Access Statistics for this article

Global Environmental Politics is currently edited by Steven Bernstein, Matthew Hoffmann and Erika Weinthal

More articles in Global Environmental Politics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().