@phdthesis{01M101PNRFK0RDPG3GC3FD7NXF,
  abstract     = {{As the European Union (EU) seeks to project its environmental standards globally through the European
Green Deal and the Clean Industrial Deal, its purported leadership remains under significant scrutiny. This dissertation argues that without nuanced empirical analyses designed to check or confirm this leadership from the follower’s gaze, our understanding of global climate governance remains speculative and Eurocentric. Leadership is not an inherent quality of the EU’s institutional design; rather, it is a relational status that must be granted, validated, and practiced by its followers.
To address this followership gap, this research proposes the Strategic Climate Followership Agency
(SCFA), shifting the analytical lens from leader to follower to theorize the complexities of normative
influence. The study investigates how a technological middle power like South Korea strategically mediates EU norms to suit its own developmental and industrial interests. Methodologically, the study employs a reflexive qualitative approach by adopting a decentring agenda in EU foreign policy analysis and leveraging the researcher’s positionality to facilitate an analysis grounded in the follower’s local context. It treats South Korea as an active EU climate policy partner and a strategic agent of transition.
The research findings are developed across three stages. First, the dissertation utilizes governance as a
conceptual bridge to integrate EU studies and comparative regionalism. By doing this, it provincializes the EU as one regional manifestation of climate governance among many. Next, it investigates South Korea’s green taxonomy policymaking, demonstrating how institutional actors selectively localized EU taxonomy norms to legitimize domestic energy preferences, resulting in an ‘anti-normative’ effect. Finally, it compares hydrogen policy development in the EU and South Korea as peer cases. It illustrates how the contrast between European regulatory governance and South Korea’s developmental state model yields divergent transition trajectories.
Ultimately, this dissertation demonstrates that the EU’s normative influence is fundamentally dependent on the strategic requirements of followership. Moreover, it suggests a re-categorization of both the EU and South Korea as high-capacity middle powers navigating a multiplex order. The study concludes that global influence in the green transition is increasingly defined by a dual strategic competency: the ability to both exercise leadership and skillfully utilize followership to secure domestic economic survival and
international status. The future of global climate governance lies in the sophisticated co-production of green norms between peers who recognize that strategic followership is an essential site of independent choice.}},
  author       = {{Kim, Bohyun}},
  keywords     = {{Decentring,Strategic Climate Followership Agency (SCFA),Provincializing Europe,South Korea,Norm Localization,Green Industrial Policy,Multiplex Governance}},
  language     = {{eng}},
  pages        = {{XV, 213}},
  publisher    = {{Ghent University. Faculty of Political and Social Sciences}},
  school       = {{Ghent University}},
  title        = {{Decentring EU climate leadership : strategic followership agency in the South Korean green transition}},
  year         = {{2026}},
}