Introduction

As stated by Buzan and Lawson (2014: 71) there is ‘general agreement that the world is changing, but considerable disagreement about how it is changing’. Climate change is a disruption that challenges both humankind as a whole and the international order. To deal with this, the Paris Agreement from December 2015 aims to limit the global temperature rise to no more than two degrees Celcius by the year 2100 at the latest (UN, 2017). This ambitious political agreement, however, has no credible sanction mechanism for punishing potential defectors that do not wish to reduce greenhouse gases. The risk of free riding is prevalent in climate negotiations (Svendsen, 2005). Thus, swift and decisive action is needed if the political goals are to be achieved. Here, the European Union (EU) and the European External Action Service (EEAS) have, in particular, showcased their commitment to assuming the role of a prominent global climate leader to solve the collective action problem (Jørgensen et al, 2022).

This is no modest ambition, nor an easy path to take for the EU, as we shall see. First, it is not clear from the literature how this collective action problem should be tackled in an efficient way that rewards changes in polluting behaviour and, at the same time, encourages countries to reduce emissions and undertake investments in new green technology (Svendsen, 2020a, 2020b). Second, this cannot be achieved within the traditional foreign policy paradigm of liberal internationalism, as a market failure occurs if the dysfunctional effects of free trade are not corrected by intervention.