Environmental Policy Integration

Greening Sectoral Policies in Europe

Andrea Lenschow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781853837098
• eBook ISBN: 9781136566448
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Biological Sciences

Integrating environmental policies into the policies of all other sectors is the core European environmental policy. But there has been no thorough investigation of the political process involved. This volume provides the first. It analyses the process of policy integration - the greening of public policy - across the relevant sectors and countries. It finds significant variation from sector to sector and from country to country, and analyses the reasons for this. (Surprisingly the UK, traditionally the 'dirty man' of Europe is far more actively engaged than environmental 'progressives' such as Germany.) It identifies the obstacles to integration and offers solutions for policy formulation, decision making and implementation at the relevant political levels.

Part I

Introduction

1

Greening the European Union: An Introduction

Andrea Lenschow

Introduction

Effective environmental protection requires the consideration of environmental consequences in all ‘technical planning and decision-making processes’ at national and Community level (OJ, 1973, p6). So stated the first Environmental Action Programme (EAP) of the European Community in 1973. In 1999, Environment Commissioner Margot Wallström described current integration strategies (adopted in the fifth EAP) as ‘the start of an important process… the beginning of a learning process in our thinking and attitudes’ (EWWE, 1999a, p12, emphasis added). For more than a quarter of a century, the issue of environmental policy integration (EPI) had been neglected in the European Union (EU), despite its widely recognized importance for environmental protection. This book traces the bottlenecks hampering effective EPI in Community and national policy-making and identifies possible opportunities and solutions for dealing with this problem.

By the late 1990s, the process and the problem of achieving EPI had become very topical. Since the European Council meeting in Luxembourg in December 1997, the issue of EPI has been a regular concern for the European heads of state or government. Arguably, achieving EPI has become ‘the critical challenge confronting European environmental policy-makers at the dawn of the new millennium’ (Jordan and Lenschow, 1999, p31). In view of barely satisfactory results of environmental regulatory policy to improve the state of the environment in Europe, and also in response to an increasingly deregulatory policy-making climate, attention has shifted towards changing the nature and outlook of sectoral policies. ‘Sustainable development’ is the new paradigm that is supposed to guide all policy-makers. However, despite these recent political commitments, progress towards achieving the integration of environmental concerns in all sectoral policy-making on the EU and the national level remains slow. The appearance of a wide consensus on the EPI principle among political leaders contrasts with considerable resistance among the stakeholders to apply an integrative approach in practice. The Commission notes that the ‘commitment by other sectors and by Member States … is partial’ (CEC, 1999a, p3). Analytically even more interesting, the degree of policy integration varies from policy area to policy area and from country to country. It is the objective of this book to investigate the nature of the challenge and the reasons for such variation.

In short, what are the bottlenecks obstructing EPI in spite of the emerging ‘conventional wisdom … that the environment must be an integral factor of other policy areas’ (Jordan, 1998a, p12)? What are the opportunities for advancing the goal of EPI? What are the factors that explain different performance levels between states and what factors are responsible for sectoral variation? The structure of this book permits some insights into these questions. The three country studies on the UK, Germany and Italy in Part II allow us to investigate the role of political leadership, constitutional and administrative structure and the role of societal actors. Subsequent policy studies in Part III, focusing on sectoral changes in the context of the EU multilevel system, alert us to sector-specific interest constellations, reform options, costs and benefits.

This introductory chapter presents the background to the subsequent analysis. It introduces the concept of EPI and provides an overview of the evolution and present significance of the principle in Europe. Considering that EPI is widely perceived as a vital prerequisite for improving the state of the environment, the varied but generally deficient application of the principle is worrisome. This chapter illustrates this policy challenge and previews some of the performance assessments aired in the policy discourse. It offers a ‘flavour’ of the issues that are discussed in depth in the subsequent chapters. The chapter closes with several possible explanations for the currently unhappy state of affairs. These options are reviewed in the concluding chapter, in light of the case and country studies in Parts II and III.

The EPI Principle: The Idea and its History in the EU

The principle of environmental policy integration emerged in the context of a paradigm shift on the international level and as a response to an internal performance crisis. On the one hand, it is closely related to the concept of sustainable development, which – though not new – began to shape the general thinking on environmental protection since the publication in 1987 of the report of the United Nations’ World Commission on Environment and Development, entitled Our Common Future and commonly referred to as the Brundtland Report (WCED, 1987). The EU’s fifth EAP followed the language of the Brundtland Report in calling for cross-sectoral policy integration as a means to ‘green’ all economic activities already at the planning stage. The linking of EPI to the rhetorically powerful paradigm of sustainable development contributed to its political acceptance, but it has done less to facilitate adaptation on the operational level (see later in this chapter).

The acceptance of the need for a more integrative approach was equally triggered by a gloomy internal assessment of past policy practices. Traditionally, the EU has treated the protection of the environment as the sole responsibility of environmental policy-makers in the Commission’s Environment Directorate-General (DG XI) and the national environment ministries rather than a common responsibility. In this framework, the EU made use of regulatory, mostly ‘command-and-control’, policy instruments. Neither the general state of the environment (cf EEA, 1999) nor the implementation of concrete EU regulations gave much evidence that the EU was on the right path with this strategy (CEC, 1996; Collins and Earnshaw, 1992). Present efforts to establish the environment as a horizontal policy matter and to build a cross-sectoral ‘Partnership for Integration’ (CEC, 1998) reflect the lessons drawn from policy failure, while borrowing recipes from the new international discourse on environmental protection. However, the ones who were made responsible for policy failure in the environmental field and therefore contemplated new solutions and those to carry the main burden of the proposed changes were not the same. Neither policy failure nor a paradigm shift led by the environmental community necessarily made much of an impression on sectoral policy-makers. On the following pages, I will provide an overview of the ideational process as well as the legal and institutional changes that followed from internal and external pressures, as well as of the obstacles that remained.

EPI and Sustainable Development: Consequences of a Conceptual Linkage

The principle of environmental policy integration may be considered a core application of the concept of sustainable development, which has gained much influence in the international environmental discourse since the 1970s. I suggest that this conceptual linkage has contributed to the political legitimation of EPI in the EU. EPI has become a firmly embedded normative principle in the EU acquis. At the same time, however, the EPI principle suffers from some ambiguities and weaknesses of its ‘mother principle’, with the risk of undermining its legitimacy in sectoral policy-making.

The core idea of ‘sustainable development’ is that environmental protection, economic growth and social development are mutually compatible, rather than conflicting, objectives. Environmental protection ensures that the very foundation for economic activity and the human existence are not destroyed. Economic and social development, in turn, are considered possible without further depleting non-renewable resources and reducing biodiversity. This idea entered the international political agenda in 1972 when the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) was convened in Stockholm. During preparatory meetings, the notion of ‘eco-development’, emphasizing the interdependence between ecological and developmental goals, was developed and subsequently formed the basis for the sustainable development debate (Alker and Haas, 1993, pp5–6, citing UNEP (1981) as a main reference). In 1980, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources presented the World Conservation Strategy (IUCN, 1980) which focused on the ecological dimension of sustainable development – that is, the conservation of living and non-renewable resources.

The publication of the Brundtland Report broadened this perspective to the social and political sphere and firmly established the concept on the European political agenda. The report defined sustainable development as ‘a process of change in which the exploitation of resources, the direction of investment, the orientation of technological development, and institutional change are made consistent with future as well as present needs’ (WCED, 1987, pp8–9). It presumes that ‘technology and social organization can be both managed and improved to make way for a new era of economic growth’ (p8) and that policies ‘that sustain and expand the environmental resource base’ can be devised (p1). The introductory note that ‘[o]ur message is, above all, directed towards people, whose well-being is the ultimate goal of all environment and development policies’ (pxiv) and the compatibility assumptions behind the concept resonate well with the economic mainstream, while equally responding to the emerging environmental concerns in Western Europe. ‘Sustainable development’ represents an idea able to facilitate political consensus; it offers a story that is attractive to many actors because it provides a conceptual foundation for the pursuit of widely accepted ethical values (intergenerational equity, alleviation of poverty, environmental protection foundation for the pursuit of widely accepted ethical values (intergenerational equity, alleviation of poverty, environmental protection) at seemingly low financial and political costs.¹

It gained particular currency in EU circles where the problem of squaring the objective of economic competitiveness with the goal of environmental protection had resulted in increasingly controversial debates, which even resulted in several court cases dealing with the priority or compatibility of economic and environmental objectives (Koppen, 1993). The old regulatorybased approach began to face a serious legitimacy crisis, as it seemed to impose high costs on economic actors without producing the desired environmental improvements. It is therefore hardly surprising that the new ‘no trade-off ’ conceptualization of the economy–environment relationship and the related ‘softening’ of the top-down regulatory approach found increasing acceptance.

Clearly implicit in the notion that environmental, economic and social objectives may be achieved in a mutually compatible way is the integration principle. In Angela Liberatore’s words (1997, p107):

The relevance of integration for moving towards sustainable development is straightforward: if environmental factors are not taken into consideration in the formulation and implementation of the policies that regulate economic activities and other forms of social organization, a new model of development that can be environmentally and socially sustainable in the long term cannot be achieved.

Put differently, EPI represents a first-order operational principle to implement and institutionalize the idea of sustainable development. However, its legitimacy was based not only on this conceptual linkage, but equally on the evolution of the EU treaties. By the early 1980s, the concept of sustainable development had entered the policy programmes of most European governments and the EU; the legal obligation to policy integration was established with the Single European Act in 1987; and a commitment to ‘sustainable development’ was made in the Amsterdam Treaty (1999).

Nevertheless, the fact that EPI is widely perceived as tied to sustainable development is not unproblematic. The concrete interpretations of the concept and the political consequences of having made a commitment to sustainable development vary widely. For instance, the Dutch government adopted in its National Environmental Policy Plan a holistic notion of the relationship between environment and the economy, and inferred from it the need for deep attitudinal changes in society, which are to be developed ‘bottom up’. The German government and industry tend to perceive sustainable development as a chance to market environmental technologies, focusing otherwise on the correction of market failures through top-down regulatory environmental policies. In Britain, by contrast, the emphasis has been on rationalizing government and the elimination of policy contradictions between regulatory environmental policy and sectoral policies, which could quite possibly result in the dilution of existing policies to protect the environment (Lenschow, 1999a; Jordan and Lenschow, 1999).² The EU itself has not yet adopted a very strong version of the concept of ‘sustainable development’ as a policy-guiding idea.³

Ambiguity may have served the quick and continuing acceptance of the concept and made it a reference point in defining policy problems. However, it may also undermine a clear and effective operationalization. EPI means something else in a context where sustainable development aims at the rationalization of government compared to where sustainable development implies holistic planning. As we will see below, EPI has been understood in the EU first as a political aspiration and a mainly procedural principle (cf Nollkaemper in Chapter 2 on the normative and legal ambiguities of EPI). It implies that policy-makers in non-environmental sectors recognize the environmental repercussions of their decisions and adjust them when they undermine sustainable development. The European Environment Agency (EEA) defines EPI as a process of shifting the focus of environmental policy away ‘from the environmental problems themselves to their causes … [and] [f]rom “end of pipe” environment ministrie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• About the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and Abbreviations
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Country Studies
• Part III: European Union Policy Studies
• Part IV: Conclusion
• Index