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The European Union (EU) is widely assumed to be a global environmental leader, especially in addressing climate change, though this reputation suffered greatly when European leaders were sidelined during the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen. Subsequently, however, the EU has made significant progress in extending its Emission Trading System to the aviation sector, one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions, and did so not only regionally, but also managed to get it onto the global policy agenda. This contribution investigates the EU's role in shaping the 2013 International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) resolution committing 191 government signatories to developing a global market-based measure to cap international aviation's carbon pollution. While not exactly setting new environmental standards or achieving definitive regulatory success, the case illustrates the agenda-setting capacity of the EU through leveraging its market power and adopting an explicitly extra-territorial rule to induce potential regulatory co-operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union's (EU's) regulations affect how business is conducted and consumers and the environment protected in parts of the world far beyond its borders. Moreover, the external impact of its regulations informs understandings of the EU as a global actor. This contribution makes three main arguments. First, the EU's regulatory influence varies systematically across different forms of regulatory interaction: regulatory competition and different forms of regulatory co-operation. The form of regulatory interaction, therefore, is a critical intervening variable between the EU's regulatory power resources and its influence. Second, within the different forms of regulatory co-operation the EU's influence varies in line with expectations derived from the literature. But, third, the magnitude of the EU's influence seems to be considerably less in regulatory co-operation than suggested by the literature on regulatory competition; a finding that reinforces the first argument. The contribution also introduces the rest of the special issue, identifying three overarching conclusions: the utility of the EU's regulatory power resources is context specific; debates about what kind of power the EU is, at least as previously conceived, are unproductive; and that the EU's engagement in the world is better explained through general theories of international political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]