Review: Environmental Policy in the EU: Actors, Institutions and Processes

Abstract

recognising that environmental policy is no longer a new and precarious gate-crasher among the EU’s competencies and is now an established part of the EU’s identity and purpose. As such, debates on how environmental policy operated ‘without portfolio’ and secured a legal foothold, or how sustainable development became a formal objective of European integration, remain important in helping students to build up a picture of why EU environmental policy making has evolved in particular ways, but require less attention compared with understanding how interplays between Europe’s governing institutions and member states continue to shape EU environmental politics or more recent political debates over the adoption of new modes and instruments of governing. The two main manifestations of this shift in emphasis are: the inclusion of helpful chapter summaries and recommended reading lists to guide students through theoretical debates and policy developments for each topic; and a tauter sense of progression through the themes explored. Previous editions had a similar construction, with sections on: “The historical and institutional context of EU environmental policy”; “Key actors involved in environmental policymaking”; “The policy dynamics of EU environmental policy”; and “Future challenges”. What is most striking this time around is the precision with which each section is composed to guide readers through topics. Whereas “Policy dynamics” in the second edition contained three articles (on task expansion, accommodating diversity, and rule making) that refl ected particular policy dynamics without ever claiming to provide a comprehensive review of all policy dynamics, the third edition studiously subdivides policy processes into chapters on: agenda setting; policy making; coordination; implementation; evaluation; and the EU as an international environmental actor. The net effect of these changes and the authorship of each chapter by leading scholars is an accessible but highly authoritative text for those interested in, but without extensive prior knowledge of, the European Union. One more disappointing absence is a dedicated section on ‘making EU environmental policy’ and the resulting dearth of detailed case studies of how key pieces of legislation emerged on the EU’s political agenda and were negotiated and implemented. For a geographer such as myself these more microlevel analyses of the EU’s regulatory travails and triumphs provided different but no less revealing insights into the factors shaping the EU’s capacity