Research Approach

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 greenhouse gas emissions, managing the resurgence of resource nationalism, and adapting to dwindling low-cost reserves of fossil fuels in the context of massively rising demand driven by major emerging economies such as China and India, energy poses challenges that transcend national borders, involve both the public and private sectors and cannot be meaningfully addressed at national or regional levels. In short: energy interdependence calls for global energy governance.

While the global dimension of energy challenges is unambiguous, the international community generally, and the transatlantic alliance in particular, has so far failed to supply the effective governance mechanisms that would form the basis of an effective multilateralism. The substantive focus of the project will build upon our previous work on global energy governance and will address a whole new set of pressing policy challenges.

• Governance of global carbon emissions (post-Copenhagen strategy).
• Managing the resurgence of resource nationalism.
• Governing the global market for oil in the context of rising demand and dwindling low-cost reserves.

Each of these dimensions feature thorny political and economic challenges in their own right. While strong transatlantic leadership is certainly necessary to shape global energy governance, it won’t be sufficient. Thus, the transatlantic alliance not only needs to resolve its own (frequently significant) differences over substance and approach in dealing with global energy issues. It will also have to devise congenial ways to include other emerging powers – especially China – into the mix.

While each of the issue clusters deals with different dimensions of the global energy governance puzzle, the proposed work will zoom in on each of the clusters to explore the potential for more effective transatlantic leadership in global energy governance providing the framework for:

• an exchange over substantive transatlantic policy differences
• a dialogue on the utility (and potential complementarily) of different policy strategies, and finally
• discussions about potential ways and means to engage new powers, and specifically China, into efforts to organize effective global energy governance.

The findings from these three different issue clusters will be tied together in an overall Transatlantic Agenda Paper that will set out a strategy for the EU and the US to provide leadership on global energy governance in the years ahead.