'Greening' the European Union?

‘Greening’ the European Union? The Europeanization of EU Environment policy1 Introduction In parallel with its development as a deeply integrated economic zone the European Union has evolved as a space where a cumulatively significant pooling of sovereignty around environmental issues has developed apace. From a position in the early days of the European integration process where the environment hardly featured, the EU of 28 member states of today has highly developed policy competences across a range of environmental areas and is a signatory to more than 60 multilateral international environmental agreements (Vogler and Stephan 2007). Since at least the mid-1980s the EU supranational space has contended with and to a significant degree displaced the national level as the preferred locus of activity for its member states on environmental issues. This process of evolution and adaptation has not been a linear one: contestation of and resistance to a muscular EU presence within the environment has been a permanent feature of the politics of the environment in Europe and of inter-institutional relations in Brussels. But the stark reality of climate change in particular has moved the member states toward tacit acceptance of the need for a strong EU environmental acquis as the key mechanism for managing cross-border externalities of different kinds and for maintaining leadership within the international domain. The key turning point in moving Europeans toward enhanced environmental action came in 1986 when the principle of substantive environmental integration was introduced into the treaties by the Single European Act (SEA), which stated that environmental requirements shall be a component of the European Communities other policies (Article 130r(2)). This commitment was further sharpened by the Maastricht treaty in 1992 which stated that environmental protection requirements must be integrated with the definition and implementation of other community policies (Article 130r(2)) (Koch and Lindenthal, 2012:981) Successive treaty changes have thus taken the environment from exclusively the intergovernmental arena to a decision-making system that combines national and shared EU competences. This should not surprise students of integration. After all environmental problems do not stop at national boundaries; their intrinsic elements demand complex technocratic arrangements supported by pooled sovereignty and international cooperation. Environmental policy within the EU thus now ‘conforms to a set of guiding principles, has its own terminology, is the focus of significant activity amongst a dedicated network of 1 O'Brennan, John (2014) '‘Greening the European Union? The Europeanization of EU Environment Policy'. In: Atkinson, H and Wade, R. (eds.) The Politics of Sustainability: linking politics, education and training, Policy Press: London. environmental actors, is underpinned by a binding framework of environmental laws, and has an explicit basis in the founding treaties’. It thus constitutes a ‘mature system of multilevel governance’ as ‘virtually all environmental policy in Europe is now made in, or in close association with, the European Union’ (Benson and Jordan, 2013: 326). This article examines the development of EU environmental policy over six decades of European integration. It assesses the contributions of individual actors and institutions and the progressive constitutionalization of environmental concerns. It evaluates the extent to which the environment has been the subject of ‘Europeanization’ of both politics and policy and the degree to which the EU as a supranational actor has influenced real and substantive internalization of progressive norms of environmental governance among its member states. It analyses the internal dynamics of EU climate change politics and how coherence is (or is not) achieved in international negotiations. The EU ‘toolkit’ for environmental governance includes both capacity-building aid and instruments of compliance, persuasion and socialization; competitive and reputational dynamics are also much in evidence. Supranational regulatory frameworks frequently push up against resistance at the national level and thus it is in the space between the Europeanized environment sector and the national administration of policies that we learn most about the efficacy and reach of EU activity. Europeanization ‘hits home’ through both politics and policy, legislative and non- legislative activity, individual and collective action and strategic and normative calculation. But this impact is far from uniform; there are myriad ways in which ‘Europe fails to hit home’ both within the EU and globally. ‘Differential Europeanization’ thus emerges as the most important feature of the evolution of EU environmental politics; it reflects different patterns in the cognitive internalization of environmental issues as well as the structural realities of bargaining power amongst economic actors across the EU. It suggests that although the European integration process has come a long way in managing environmental problems there remain significant challenges if a truly sustainable model of living can be achieved in the European Union. A Trajectory of Deepening Integration The European Union, in its foundational period and early activity, demonstrated little interest in nor capacity to administer a common approach to the environment. Indeed the Treaty of Rome (1957) did not even mention the word ‘environment’ (Benson and Jordan, 2013:325). The early Union (or ‘Community’ as it was then styled) was primarily an economic organization, the organizational logic of which was largely rationalist and intergovernmental: it would take decades before the ‘environmental impulse’ asserted itself in the treaties and in the normative understanding of the European integration process. And whilst early initiatives amounted to very little, gradually the European Commission assumed a prominent position as an advocate of environmental integration and, in alliance with a ‘leadership group’ within the Council (Denmark, Germany, Netherlands), adopted an approach which rendered environmental policy cumulatively more comprehensive in scale and scope. It is from the early 1970s that we see a more acute ecological and environmental consciousness begin to build at Community (later Union) level. In retrospect we can now identify institutional flexibility and the capacity and willingness of the European Commission in particular to interpret the treaties liberally as a space for action on the environment as important phenomena which helped to shape the policy mix which eventually emerged. One way to trace this historical trajectory is to focus on the successive environment action programmes (EAPs) produced by the Commission. The first EAP (1973-76) emerged out of a request by the member states to the Commission to prepare an environmental policy and establish a directorate with responsibility for environmental issues. It established several key principles, (including a rudimentary form of the ‘polluter pays’ principle) which subsequently evolved into treaty-based norms. It also formed the basis for a multi-year plan for action, including legislative and non-legislative options. The second EAP (1977-81) ‘emphasized the need for scientifically informed decision-making through procedures such as environmental impact assessment (EIA)’ and asserted the Commission’s desire to insinuate itself into the global policy-making sphere (Benson and Jordan, 2013: 327). Moving in a more thoroughly programmatic direction the third (1982-86) and fourth (1987- 92) EAPs delivered a much more ambitious overall strategy for protecting the environment ‘before problems occurred’ and identifying many more priority areas for collective action (Benson and Jordan, 2013: 327). By 1987 environmental action by the EU required a secure treaty base. The Single European Act identified protection of the environment as an explicit objective of the Community (Cahill, 2010: 8) The significant boost to the integration process delivered by the Act boosted the competences of EU-level actors considerably, enabling a shared approach to the environment to emerge, driven by the new EU ‘Centre’. The new environment policy emerged with a task enshrined in the treaties (now Article 191) of protecting the environment ‘through the prudent and rational utilization of natural resources’ such as oil products, natural gas and solid fuels’ (Solorio, 2012: 401) and called for Community action to ‘be based on the principles that preventive action should be taken, that environmental damage should be rectified at source, and that the polluter should pay’. (Ibid.) The Fourth Action Programme (1987-92) also signalled clear ambition by declaring that the ‘integration of the environmental dimension in other major policy areas will be a central part of the Commission’s efforts’ (Owens and Hope, 1989:97, Solario, 2012:402). Actions based on single market-based measures were governed by qualified majority voting (QMV) and the new Cooperation Procedure, involving for the first time the European Parliament, introduced by the SEA (Cahill 2010:8). By contrast environmental policy not related to the single market continued to require unanimity within the Council and was not covered by the supranational procedure. The fifth (1993-2000) and sixth (2002-12) EAPs coincided with and helped substantiate the expansion in EU competences enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty and heralded ‘a shift to a more strategic and cross-cutting

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