Follow the leader? Policy recommendations for rethinking the EU's green leadership in Asia Pacific
The EU’s global green leadership ambition, re-initiated by the European Green Deal (EGD, 2019), is struggling. Given the EU’s responsibility inherent to its position as an early region to achieve industrialization and obligation to mobilize climate finance for developing countries and regions, the EGD aims to engage and support partners in reducing their share of global carbon emissions and promoting sustainable development. However, the recent move back towards fossil fuels and the intensifying global competition in the energy transition has blurred the aim to take the lead of its green vision to the world.
To enhance its green leadership and competitiveness in the global clean energy market, the EU should work together with partner countries and regions. As not all partners of the EU’s global green initiatives are equally capable of following the EU’s leadership due to differences in resources and/or bureaucratic capabilities, the ability to facilitate followership is key to enhance the EU’s green partnerships. Thus, the EU’s green leadership strategy must actively incorporate the interdependent relationship between leaders (those who initiate change) and followers (those who adopt and implement it). This requires a fundamental shift away from a perspective that solely emphasizes the EU’s role as a green leader. Instead, the strategy should prioritize understanding and addressing the needs, capacities, and perspectives of follower countries who will be implementing the green policies, thereby creating a more collaborative and ultimately more successful path towards shared environmental goals.
Key points
- The EU’s leadership aspirations for green partnerships and diplomacy have had limited efficacy in inducing sufficient and practicable followership in Asia Pacific.
- Active engagement with domestic green mobilization is essential to encourage followership, particularly from developed Asian Pacific economies.
- To build symbiotic green leadership-followership relationships with emerging ASEAN economies, both financial and material support for capacity-building should be prioritized over the EU’s geoeconomic interests.
- More investment in context-specific research on Asia Pacific will enhance region-to-region knowledge exchange for mutual green transitions and upgrade the EU’s green leadership strategy in the region.
About the author
Bohyun Kim is a PhD researcher at Ghent University. She holds MSc. European Studies (Research Master) from Maastricht University, the Netherlands, and MA. Political Sciences from University of Cologne, Germany. Her PhD focuses on fast climate policymaking at EU-level and in South Korea. By juxtaposing the two distinctive climate governance development cases together, her research aims to highlight the necessity of comparative research between the EU and its external partners, and critically reflect on the EU climate leadership concept. She possesses four years of teaching experience in the topic of 'EU Climate Governance in a Globalizing World' as well as 'Comparative Regionalism: Europe and East Asia'.
Before starting her PhD, Bohyun worked at different international organizations and NGOs in the field of climate change and sustainable development, such as: European Union Delegation to South Korea, ICLEI World Secretariat - Local Governments for Sustainability, UNESCO and UNFCCC - the UN Climate Conference Secretariat based in Bonn, Germany.
She also spent the four weeks of February 2024 at VUB Centre for Environment, Economy and Energy, Brussels School of Governance as part of Green Deal-NET short-term fellowship.