On 5 September 2005, during the 8th EU-China Summit held in Beijing, the European Union
and China signed an agreement to establish a bilateral Partnership on Climate Change. The
two parties pledged to strengthen the dialogue on climate change policies, exchange views
on key issues in climate change negotiations and develop concrete action to tackle climate
change by carrying out specific cooperative projects. By presenting an analysis of the
outcomes of this bilateral initiative from the EU and China, this paper tries to assess if the
EU-China partnership on climate change can be considered, as intended, an important
contribution to a multilateral solution to climate change, or if this bilateral relationship only
functions at a rhetorical level without producing concrete results
