The institutional dimension of European energy security: potentials and limitations of the EU external energy governance

The aim of this article is to describe the institutional dimension of the EU energy security policies and to assess the effectiveness of the EU external energy governance in the Black Sea and Caspian Sea Basins and in Central Asia. After a short presentation of the evolution of the EU external policies for energy security, the institutional subsystem for the region will be reconstructed in detail. In particular, its origins, rationale, goals and historical development will be considered. In the second part, the article uses the framework of governance architectures and regime complexes to analyse the institutional interplay, coherence and output effectiveness of the governance structures created by the EU in the region. Then, the article uses the framework of EU external governance to evaluate the effectiveness of the institutional subsystem at the outcome level. Three main dimension of external energy security governance will be considered: energy market convergence, infrastructures management and legal investment framework and planning. The findings of the research demonstrate that EU strategy has been quite effective at output level, whereas the effectiveness of external energy security governance has been quite disappointing.