Green Hydrogen Diplomacy: Examining Emerging Bilateral Partnerships Between the Middle East and North Africa, the European Union, and Sub-Saharan Africa

The European Union’s REPowerEU Plan (2022) targets 10 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen imports by 2030, catalyzing an unprecedented cascade of bilateral green hydrogen partnerships with countries across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Despite the strategic and developmental significance of these partnerships, the literature has treated hydrogen largely as a techno-economic or single-country problem, leaving the diplomatic architecture and equity dimensions of EU–MENA–SSA hydrogen diplomacy under-theorized and unmeasured. This study addresses these gaps by integrating energy-security realism, regime-complex theory, and critical political ecology into a synthetic framework, and by introducing two novel empirical instruments: a hand-coded dataset of 26 in-scope bilateral hydrogen agreements (2020–2024) and a fully specified protocol for a Green Hydrogen Diplomacy Equity Index (GHD-EI). A longitudinal dyad-year panel skeleton (27 EU importers × 36 MENA/SSA exporters, 2015–2026, 11,664 dyad-year cells) has been constructed to host a planned multi-method quantitative sequence, structural gravity PPML, staggered difference-in-differences, synthetic control, exponential random graph models, and causal forests whose execution against fully populated covariates is reserved for a subsequent paper. This paper is accordingly framed as a data descriptor and specified analytical protocol, reporting descriptive and structural findings from the 26 in-scope agreements: a 2022 inflection synchronized with REPowerEU and COP27; importer-side concentration on Germany (34.6% of agreements) and EU-level framework partnerships (34.6%)—two distinct actors jointly accounting for 69.2%—and a small, statistically non-significant difference in mean partnership depth between MENA (n = 18, M = 3.22) and SSA (n = 8, M = 3.25) exporters (Welch t = −0.08, p = 0.94; Cohen’s d = −0.04). The comparison is likely under-powered (power ≈ 0.20–0.44) given the small SSA cell and reported here as a tentative pattern. At this stage, the study contributes a cross-regional agreement dataset, a fully specified equity-indicator protocol, and a theoretical framework for subsequently evaluating whether the green hydrogen transition advances just internationalism or reproduces green-extractivist patterns.