The common dependency on energy, shared by societies around the world, entails policy challenges of global nature and scope. From dealing with the negative externalities of carbon dioxide emissions and devising rules for the market for oil to regulating access to the civilian use of nuclear technology, energy poses challenges that transcend national borders, involve both the public and private sectors and cannot be meaningfully addressed at a national or regional (eg European) level. In short: Energy interdependence calls for global energy governance. The European Union has been a champion of effective multilateralism in all key areas of global energy governance. However, current reality falls well short of these goals.

One of the most important shortcomings of the status quo is that existing mechanisms have failed to effectively include crucial new players in the global energy arena. This especially holds true with regards to China, an increasingly important player and unavoidable factor in view of managing global energy challenges. Indeed, as Javier Solana, the first EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, has argued the EU needs to “go beyond a narrow Western prism” in seeking effective global energy governance. “This means thinking about changing the governance system of energy, involving new players.” However, both policymakers and researchers in Europe have not sufficiently heeded Solana’s call to move beyond a narrow Western prism. So far there is insufficient cooperation between Europe and China in the area of energy governance and as a consequence researchers as well as policymakers in Europe still know little about the internal context, motivations and objectives of China's approaches to global energy governance.

Project objectives

In order to fill this gap, policy research needs to proceed in three steps: First, analyze the drivers that shape European and Chinese approaches to global energy governance. Second, assess areas of convergence and divergence and third, based on these analyses, sketch out concrete options and pathways for joint stakeholdership of global energy governance – both from a positive and a normative perspective. In order to do so, the project zooms in on a number of specific policy issues, from the governance of global carbon emissions to the governance of global oil markets.

The pilot project provided a first cut at each of these three steps. We did so with partners from Europe (Oxford University, Elcano Royal Institute), China (Peking University) and the US (Brookings Institution as an associated partner). We held two internal workshops (in March 2010 and July 2010) and prepared a number of background papers.