The EU-China Partnership on Climat Change: Bilateralism Begetting Multilateralism in Promoting a Climate Change Regime?

On 5 September 2005, during the 8th EU-China Summit held in Beijing, the European Union and China signed an agreement to establish a bilateral Partnership on Climate Change. The two parties pledged to strengthen the dialogue on climate change policies, exchange views on key issues in climate change negotiations and develop concrete action to tackle climate change by carrying out specific cooperative projects. By presenting an analysis of the outcomes of this bilateral initiative from the EU and China, this paper tries to assess if the EU-China partnership on climate change can be considered, as intended, an important contribution to a multilateral solution to climate change, or if this bilateral relationship only functions at a rhetorical level without producing concrete results