The Changing ASEAN-EU Interregional Environmental Cooperation

Since the mid-1990s, along with the accelerating process of globalization and regionalization as well as the global expansion of neo-regionalism wave, interregionalism, as a sign of institutional cooperation between the different regions, has become a new world-wide phenomenon in the international relations. The interregional level is a significant research dimension between the regional and global level, which provides a new interacting layer for different regions. The ASEAN - EU Dialogue Relations can be dated back to 1977 and since interregional environmental cooperation has many unique characteristics such as low sensitivity, wide range of influencing scope and multi-beneficiary spectrum, it has gradually become a leading frontier of transnational negotiations during the past 30 years. The interregional environmental cooperation has a rising status since 1980s and becomes an eye-ball drawing concern after the hot topics of economic trade and political dialogue in 1990s. EU has put more and more focus on the partnership of ASEAN, because ASEAN is not also the EU's fifth largest trading partner, but also ASEAN will play an increasingly important role in addressing global challenges such as climate change, energy security and so on. On the whole, the interregional cooperation on climate change has developed into one of the most successful cooperating areas of ASEAN-EU interregional environmental cooperation.The research object is limited to the ASEAN-EU interregional cooperation on climate change. The basic assumption of this research is that the climate change issue has been paid much attention and climate change cooperation has developed into a quite successful interregional environmental cooperation model, which will promote the development of regional environmental governance regime in ASEAN and even in the whole region of East Asia, as well as stimulate an innovative thinking approach to explore a new model of global environmental governance. The objectives of this research are to analyze the stage characteristics, dynamics regime, developing constraints and prospects of the evolution of interregional cooperation on climate change by introducing a new research dimension of interregional level.Based on what has mentioned above, this paper is composed by five parts: the first part is to construct the theoretical framework for the whole paper, that is, to deduce the connotation of interregional environmental cooperation based on the existing academic results of "interregionalism", and to analyze the functions of interregional environmental cooperation as well as the characteristics of climate change cooperation. The second part employs a longitudinal analysis of the evolution stages of ASEAN-EU interregional climate change cooperation based on several landmark events such as the subscription of "United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change" in 1992, " the Kyoto Protocol" in 1996 as well as negotiation-opening for the "Post-Kyoto Protocol Era"in 2006.The third part launchs an inductive horizontal comparative analysis of the overall characteristics of ASEAN-EU interregional cooperation on climate change. The fourth part applies the Level Analysis Methodology to analyze the dynamics regime for interregional cooperation on climate change from global , regional and national level respectively. The final part chooses several closing influencing variables to probe into the developing bottlenecks of interregional coopeation on climate change and anticipate the future of ASEAN-EU interregional environmental cooperation in "Post-Kyoto Protocol Era".