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Despite all the advancements we have achieved globally in recent decades, as many as 750 million people still lack access to electricity. Tackling energy poverty requires far more...
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The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process is marred by gridlock in the UN Conference of the Parties (CoP) multilateral framework, threatening joint efforts by countries to mitigate the climate crisis. However, a strategic pivot by countries towards climate-friendly bilateral partnerships that enable each country’s national strategic goals while also achieving global climate emission reductions may change the path to multilateral agreements. This is exemplified by the groundbreaking 2026 Indo-German Green Hydrogen Corridor, which could end this gridlock. These bilateral or “minilateral” agreements between two countries or small groups of countries could bypass stalled global consensus, creating high-trust zones that de-risk the transition for individual economies and deliver binding commercial realities more quickly. Indeed, such agreements could ultimately become a template for broader multilateral action.
The Rise of Nationally Strategic Negotiations
This shift toward bilateralism or “minilateralism” is a transition from seeking universal consensus among 190+ nations to forming high-impact, smaller-scale “Climate Clubs” and “Just Energy Transition Partnerships” (JETPs). These strategic alliances allow ambitious nations to set common standards for green industries or provide targeted finance to emerging economies to retire coal assets.
In this new landscape, national interest and economic advantage replace global altruism as the primary drivers of action. Minilateralism efforts thus offer some advantages over global efforts:
Speed: Bilateral deals move in years or months rather than decades.
Enforcement: They use trade terms and finance (hard power) to replace mere peer pressure (soft power).
Focus: Negotiations are led by major emitters and market leaders, that is, countries where emissions are high by global standards, and where there are globally large opportunities, together with the technological capacity, for meeting energy demands, rather than all UN member states.
Beyond trade in low and zero-carbon products, this FTA serves as a template for future WTO reform through:
Strategic de-risking: The deal incentivizes a so-called “China plus one” strategy, diverting 5–9 percent of trade away from China toward the India-EU corridor.
Sustainability integration: For the first time, India has included deep chapters on sustainable food systems as well as trade and sustainable development, aligning trade directly with Paris Climate Agreement goals.
New-age rules: The deal establishes frameworks for digital trade and carbon border adjustment mechanisms (CBAM), providing a blueprint for issues the WTO has yet to codify.
The Indo-German Green Hydrogen Corridor
Minilateralism in the climate change space is already underway, and the Green & Sustainable Development Partnership (GSDP) between India and Germany exemplifies how bilateralism delivers a binding commercial reality. While multilateral finance often remains promised but undelivered, this partnership is backed by a €10 billion commitment with specific project pipelines. The partnership included the signing of the AM Green-Uniper deal, which anchored this partnership as a binding offtake agreement between India’s AM Green and Germany’s Uniper. Uniper will offtake up to 500,000 tonnes per annum of green ammonia starting in 2028, establishing the first major India-Europe Green Hydrogen Corridor. This deal succeeds by building a closed-loop system in which Germany provides purchase guarantees and technology while India provides low-cost renewable energy and land. There are at least four more Indiangreen hydrogen plants that are under construction in India, and that are mentioned in the partnership. Germany has also committed to encouraging its companies to buy Indian green hydrogen and to invest in technology in India. Krupp has since announced its intention to build a green hydrogen plant in India.
Regulatory Harmonization (RFNBO)
A critical hurdle in hydrogen trade is the EU’s rigorous RFNBO (Renewable Fuel of Non-Biological Origin) certification. India and Germany have harmonized their technical standards—including rules on additionality and temporal correlation (which ensure that green hydrogen production does not cannibalize existing renewable energy (RE) capacity that would otherwise be used to decarbonize the local grid, and that the production of green hydrogen occurs simultaneously with the generation of the underlying renewable electricity to ensure fossil-fuel backup is not quietly pulled from the grid) —allowing Indian projects to receive pre-certification that they meet the RNFBO standards, meaning that green hydrogen can be shipped from India without time-consuming post-facto certification. This alignment allows investors to avoid the need for a multilaterally agreed global certification treaty.
The harmonization, technology transfer, and buy-back arrangements could, in the future, form the basis of UNFCCC agreements. Other developing countries could also use this model – of committing supplies at a competitive price and to mutually-agreeable certification requirements – to supply low and zero-carbon energy to developed countries that are willing to enter into mutually beneficial agreements.
Fragmentation Versus Progress
The shift toward bilateralism has been accelerated by diminishing belief in multilateral efficacy, which was further exacerbated by the March 2026 US-Israel attack on Iran and ongoing US-India tariff disputes. These events highlight the limitations of existing multilateral agreements and the notion of “might is right.” While minilateralism offers speed, it carries risks of fragmentation and the exclusion of smaller, vulnerable nations. These smaller countries face the greatest climate threats of submergence and drought pandemics, but too often do not have either large enough economies or large and deep enough energy markets to be attractive for bilateral agreements.
The India-Germany Green Hydrogen Partnership and the India-EU FTA suggest that bilateralism is not a substitute for the global order, but a strategic bypass to save it. By creating corridors such as the India-Germany Green Hydrogen Corridor and values-based coalitions, nations like India and Germany are setting the standards that could eventually force a race to the top in broader multilateral frameworks. The challenge for future UNFCCC and WTO processes will be to adapt the procedures of these agreements to incorporate these high-impact bilateral successes into a unified global architecture.
The Iran war has disrupted Eastern Mediterranean gas production, exports, and development, threatened regional energy infrastructure, and increased political and investment uncertainty.
When U.S. President Donald Trump announced that the United States was at war with Iran, he called on the country’s people to rise in revolt. “When we are finished, take over your government,” Trump said on February 28.
