| Summary: | This thesis examines the legal mechanics and dynamics of implementing linkage with the EU ETS. The voluminous literature which has developed exploring climate governance has more often equated climate governance with multilateral treaty-making. This thesis instead suggests that the global framework for climate governance is more likely to percolate up from diverse multi-level and multi-actor initiatives rather than filter down from multilateral agreement. In such a multi-level governance landscape, linkage is advanced as a mechanism to promote and maintain complementarity between emissions trading schemes, whilst advancing the incremental evolution of a global carbon trading architecture. The EU has played a leading role in international efforts to promote collective action to confront climate change since the 1990s. This thesis reviews these efforts and critically evaluates the EU’s climate leadership credentials before suggesting how the EU should moderate its leadership model. The central discussion and analysis of this thesis considers the implementation of linkage with the EU ETS. Linkage is conceptualised as a continuum, not a single event. To this end, this thesis advances direct linkage as the objective of an incremental process to achieve de minimis alignment of schemes’ critical design features. By identifying and elaborating core convergence criteria necessary for direct linkage, a framework is advanced to ensure that any candidate scheme has achieved the appropriate degree of alignment for the implementation of direct linkage with the EU ETS. Finally, through application of the previously defined core convergence criteria, this thesis advances a first substantive examination of the potential for direct linkage between the EU ETS and South Korea’s emissions trading scheme (“KETS”) since the latter’s launch in 2015.
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