Paper Titles & Abstracts

The EU's climate change policy and its leadership role in international climate change politics has become a well researched area. However, surprisingly little research has focused on Brussels-based environmental NGOs (ENGOs) and their roles and functions in both EU climate change policy-making and the EU's role in international climate change politics. This paper assesses whether ENGOs have been able to take a lead on EU climate change policy issues. It focuses not only on the most important European ENGOs (such as Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe, Friends of the Earth (FoE) Europe, Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF))but also on wider alliances and networks which include non-environmental NGOs (such as development NGOs) as well as wider societal actors. The paper assesses the role of European NGOs in EU climate change policy while analysing both the insider and outsider strategies which have been used by NGOs to both offer leadership in the EU climate change policy-making process and to lobby the EU to provide leadership in international climate change politics. The paper also analyses how well European NGOs are adapted to the challenge of multi-level climate change governance. While trying to answer the question whether European NGOs can take a lead, the paper draws on the following three types of leadership: structural, entrepreneurial and cognitive.