Greening the EU - Actors, strategies and instruments

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, grade: 1,0, Abo Akademi Turku, Finland (Abo Akademi Turku, Finland - Department of public administration), course: policy processes in the EU, language: English, abstract: This paper is an attempt to give a broad and systematic outline to environmental policy in the European Union (EU) without discussing explicit or specific problems. Environment is just one policy field among various others within the EU legislation, and the EU is itself not an isolated and closed legislative body, but rather to view it as a sophisticated and highly complex framework at a supranational level into a broader setting of international organisations and institutions on the one hand and national influences on the other hand. To catch its formal complexity it is important to look to its origins. The first steps toward EU integration related to economic issues with the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), and the Treaties establishing the European Economic Community (EEC) and finally the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) in 1957. These three together came to be referred to as the European Community (EC). The creation of the single European market during the 1970s and the early 1980s symbolises the beginning of the EU integration process. The term EU was not used before 1992 where it was introduced by the Maastricht Treaty on the European Union (TEU) which marks a substantial shift from negative to positive integration of the Member States into the EU framework.1 I will argue during the analysis that the creation of an economic community as the first step of integration had strong and significant long-standing effects to the field of environmental policy in the EU. According to Weale, I will show that 'issue linkage and spillover effects have been characteristic to the development of EU environmental policy' (Weale et al. 2005: 53). Furthermore, I will point out that this issue dynamic can be explained by the institutional setting of the EU which provides the ground for multi-level governance which is based on a high complex system of vertical and horizontal linkages, secondly the issue itself because environmental issues call for horizontal integration of policy areas and thirdly because of the interdependence of economic and environmental policy paradigm within the EU to justify environmental policy making. [...]