The European Union and the international forest negotiations

The European Union (EU) is often seen as a global leader in environmental causes ranging from climate change to biodiversity. However, in the case of sustainable forest management the EU has had difficulties in exercising influence over the international negotiation process despite initial enthusiasm amongst its member states. This thesis attempts to explain this paradox by examining the extent of the EU’s influence and by studying how that influence is shaped by interest-based, institutional-based and ideational-based considerations. By disaggregating influence into three different components, the explanatory framework highlights the ways influence can be enabled or constrained. The explanatory framework is applied to the case of international forest negotiations between 1995 and 2007. This complicated and complex case is divided into three sub-cases to improve analytical clarity. The first sub-case concerns the effort to build a legal binding instrument on global forest management. The second sub-case focuses on the issue of certification. The third sub-case concerns the drive to create a global fund for financing sustainable forest management. Each case sheds critical light on the subtle and complex factors shaping the EU’s influence on process and outcomes. Examining data from participant interviews, textual analysis, and secondary accounts, analysis shows that the EU’s influence varied in different sub-issues within the negotiations and that the factors acting on the EU’s influence are more subtle than previously understood. The findings deepen our understanding of the EU’s role in global policymaking and offer insights into how the EU may help restart global forest negotiations