THE EU in Global Environmental Governance

The course aims at enhancing the students’ knowledge and understanding of the roots and evolution of global environmental governance, as well as at providing them with the methodological tools to analyze them from an historical and political perspective. At the same time, the course investigates the role of the European Union in shaping global environmental governance and the implications of the international discourse on sustainable development in European politics, from the late 1960s to the present. Moving from the beginnings of the EC/EU environmental policy, the course deals with the evolving concepts of energy security and transition in Europe’s debates, at the national, intergovernmental and supranational level; it analyses the rise of the European sustainability agenda, across different EC/EU policy areas; and focuses on the intersection between the United Nations’ multilateral dimension of environmental governance and the EU’s. Students will be engaged in studying the complexity of such challenges as climate change and the depletion of global commons with a view to their international politics consequences. They will also be provided with the analytical tools to understanding the development of multilateral and regional institutions, as well as governmental and non-governmental actors; and to assessing the EU’s political and economic response to such challenges in the last few decades.