Environmental Policy in the EU

Actors, Institutions and Processes

Andrew Jordan, Viviane Gravey, Andrew Jordan, Viviane Gravey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429688652
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Environmental Law
• Index: Law

The European Union (EU) has a hugely important effect on the way in which environmental policies are framed, designed and implemented in many parts of the world, but especially Europe. The new edition of this leading textbook provides a state-of-the-art analysis of the EU's environmental policies.

Comprising five parts, Environmental Policy in the EU covers the rapidly changing context in which EU environmental policies are made, the key actors who interact to co-produce them and the most salient dynamics of policy making, ranging from agenda setting and decision making, through to implementation and evaluation. Written by leading international experts, individual chapters examine how the EU is responding to a multitude of different challenges, including biodiversity loss, climate change, energy insecurity, and water and air pollution. They tease out the different ways in which the EU's policies on these topics co-evolve with national and international environmental policies.

In this systematically updated fourth edition, a wider array of learning features are employed to ensure that readers fully understand how EU environmental policies have developed over the last 50 years and how they are currently adapting to the rapidly evolving challenges of the twenty-first century, including the COVID-19 pandemic. It is an essential resource for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying environmental policy and politics, climate change, environmental law and EU politics more broadly.

The Open Access versions of chapters 19 and 20, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429402333, have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1 EU environmental policy

Contexts, actors and policy dynamics

Andrew Jordan, Viviane Gravey and Camilla Adelle

DOI: 10.4324/9780429402333-1

Summary guide

At its founding in 1957, the European Union (EU) had no environmental policy, no environmental administration and no environmental laws. Today, the EU has some of the most ambitious environmental policies in the world. The central aim of this book is to provide an introduction to the history and constituent institutions of EU environmental policy, to explain how it makes and implements different types of environmental policy and to introduce some of the most salient academic debates about its past, present and future role. This chapter introduces the rest of the book. It explains how Part 1 describes the emergence of policy over the past 50 years and Part 2 introduces the main actors. The manner in which these actors interact to shape specific items of EU policy is summarised in Part 3. Part 4 explores a number of problems that are likely to challenge the EU as it moves forward. Finally, Part 5 reflects on how the aims and processes of EU environmental policy have changed over the course of the past 50 years and looks forward to the next phase in its development.

Introduction

At its founding in 1957, the European Union (EU) had no environmental policy, no environmental administration and no environmental laws. The European Economic Community (EEC), as it then was, was essentially an intergovernmental agreement between six like-minded states to boost economic prosperity and restore political relations in a Europe ravaged by two world wars. Most of the environmental policies of the EU have emerged only in the past 50 years or so. Today, the EU has some of the most ambitious environmental policies of any state in the world, although, curiously, it does not possess many of the formal attributes of a state, such as an army, a common system of taxation or a written constitution.

The central aim of this book is to provide an introduction to the history and constituent institutions of EU environmental policy, to explain how the EU makes and implements different types of environmental policy and to introduce some of the most salient academic debates about the past, present and future role of environmental policy in Europe and the wider world. Understanding how the EU acts on the environment is important as EU environmental policy heavily shapes, and is significantly shaped by, international environmental policies such as those on climate change and biodiversity conservation. Furthermore, not only is the EU an active disseminator of high environmental standards globally, it also heavily affects – or Europeanises – those in its own member states. Arguably, it is impossible to explain environmental policy within Europe or internationally without a solid understanding of the aims, objectives, processes and outcomes of EU environmental policy.

This book aims to help you to better understand and appreciate its role: first, by examining the wider context in which the EU makes policy (the historical background, the formal rules and legal procedures, etc.); second, by summarising the main actors that interact with one another to shape and implement it; and third, by examining the policy dynamics through which different ideas and political interests are translated first into concrete policies and then, perhaps eventually, tangible improvements in environmental quality.

The chapters of this book view these issues from a range of different perspectives. Thus, Part 1 (‘Contexts’) describes the emergence of this particular policy area over the past 50 years, how the EU’s environmental action developed in a complex international operating environment and the underlying institutional structures and rules governing its operation, as elaborated in the founding treaties (see Box 1.1). A myriad of different actors (some state-based, some non-state-based) work within these rules and procedures to secure their preferred policy objectives. These actors are summarised in Part 2 (‘Actors’). They are shown to have different goals (or interests), different resources and to operate at different levels of governance. The manner in which they interact on a day-by-day basis to shape specific items of EU policy is summarised in Part 3 (‘Policy dynamics’). Part 4 (‘New challenges’) explores a number of problems (some relatively new, others that first emerged many years ago) that are likely to challenge the EU as it moves forward. Finally, Part 5 (‘Conclusions’) reflects on what has been learnt about the functioning of EU environmental policy in the past 50 years and looks forward to the next phase in its development.

Box 1.1 The founding treaties

‘The founding treaties’ is a term often heard in debates about the EU. They are the legal agreements that created the EU and which, crucially, formally establish its powers and procedures. There is not a single treaty but a series of treaties which build upon one another. They include the Treaty of Paris (establishing the Economic and Steel Community) and the two Treaties of Rome: one establishing the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom), the other the European Economic Community (EEC).

The 1957 Treaty of Rome that established the EEC has been revised several times by, inter alia, the Single European Act (SEA), the Amsterdam Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty (signed in 1986, 1997 and 2009, respectively). In 2009, the Treaty of Rome was re-named the Treaty on Functioning of the European Union, and is one of two Treaties framing the EU’s work today (alongside the Treaty on European Union [TEU], first signed in Maastricht in 1992 and amply revised since). These treaties establish, in very broad terms, the roles of the various actors in the EU. This is extremely important to understand because the EU is not a sovereign state: it is only allowed to discharge policy powers that have been expressly allocated to it by its member states via the founding treaties. The text of particular environmental directives and regulations will always, for example, note which article of the treaties permits the EU to act.

The whole question of the EU’s competences is deeply political. Many cases brought before the Court of Justice of the EU turn on the precise legal base (or power) of the EU to act in a given area (see Chapter 7). But these powers are not set in stone; they change subtly over time in the period between treaty amendments, as different actors jockey for influence. Environmental policy provides a perfect case study of how policy powers can initially develop outside the formal treaty framework and then be gradually drawn into them.

This book assumes no prior knowledge of the EU, but those who are entirely new to the subject or who require a more detailed review of its history, law and institutions, may wish to consult some of the items listed in the Guide to Further Reading section at the end of this chapter. Before moving on, it is important to pause and reflect a little on what the term ‘EU’ actually denotes, as it can cause confusion. This is the subject of Box 1.2.

Box 1.2 What is ‘the EU’?

The EU has been variously described as a system of multi-level governance, a political system and a federal state in the making, and a union that is ‘always in the process of becoming’ (Laffan et al., 2000: 193). ‘What is the EU?’ is therefore a somewhat existential question. But what does the term ‘the EU’ refer to? Until the ratification of the Single European Act (SEA, the EU was officially known as the European Economic Community (EEC). The SEA officially re-christened this entity the European Community (EC), a term which remained in popular use until 1992 when the Maastricht Treaty created the European Union with a new, three-pillar structure: one comprising the EC; another covering foreign and security matters; and a third dealing with justice and home affairs. Strictly speaking, the term ‘EU’ only applies to events after 1992. However, most people now use the acronym ‘EU’ to describe its entire history and all its policy responsibilities. For the sake of convenience, in this book, the term is used to cover all the activities before and after 1992, unless otherwise specified. In general, and unless otherwise specified, the text of this book also refers to the articles of the most recent treaty, the 2009 Lisbon Treaty.

The rest of this chapter introduces the remaining chapters of the book and begins to identify some analytical questions and puzzles that resonate throughout the text; ones that we shall eventually return to in the concluding chapter.

Part 1: Contexts

Chapter 2, by Christoph Knill and Duncan Liefferink, seeks underlying explanations for the startling transformation of this policy area from what were termed a series of ‘incidental measures’ (Hildebrand, 2005) to a sophisticated, multi-level governance system in which policy-making powers are shared between supranational, national and subnational actors. One of the questions that they dwell on is how such a transformation occurred, given the unfavourable legal and institutional pre-conditions which existed in the late 1960s. It does seem remarkable today, but the word ‘environment’ was not even mentioned in the Treaty of Rome. Their analysis reveals that policy makers, acting without any legislative authority, cleverly defined environmental policy as a sub-element of trade policy. In time...