Governing Despite its Instruments? Instrumentation in EU Environmental Policy

Abstract

Demonstrating how the political sociology approach to policy instruments generates new insights even in densely studied areas, this article investigates the evolution of policy instruments and the link between policy instruments and policy change in EU environmental policy over the past three decades. Examination of the politics of choice and combination of policy instruments reveals, first, that EU environmental policy is primarily structured by its instruments. Second, the article argues that, contrary to those in the literature who have claimed a pioneering role for the Union in this field, EU environmental policy is populated not by new or innovative policy instruments, but by instruments mainly derived from the member states or other international organisations. Third, it argues that the EU's tendency to import measures from elsewhere explains the apparent contradiction between the EU's policy activism, on the one hand, and the modest domestic impact of EU legislation, on the other.

Acknowledgements

The research for this article was funded by the European Union's 6th Framework Programme, as part of the ‘NewGov – New Modes of Governance’ Project on ‘Choice and Combination of Policy Instruments: Evolving Policy Instruments in the Urban and the Environmental Policy Fields since the 1970s’ (2005–08). Helpful comments on earlier versions of this article were received from Bruno Jobert, Hussein Kassim and Patrick Le Galès. I also thank the anonymous referee for his useful suggestions and comments.

Notes

1. See the 4th (1987–92) and 5th (1993–2000) Environmental Action Programmes.

2. See for example the White Paper on Governance (2001).

3. As argued elsewhere, these authors also assume that NEPIs improve the accountability and democratic legitimacy of forms of governance in the EU, at the risk of denying the interplay of social interests and of masking power relations (Halpern 2008: 109–11).

4. We trawled archives (grey literature), law and existing literature to map the combination and change of instruments over time; we also carried out an extensive analysis of the Internet websites of major EU environmental organisations. In some cases we completed this analysis by interviewing scholars or key policy actors who were known to have a broad overview of EU environmental policy development.

5. Concerning the methodological issues we faced in developing this database, see Halpern and Le Galès (2008b).

6. Similar conclusions can be drawn from the urban and agricultural (see Grant 2010) policy domains.

7. These findings differ from what we observed in EU urban policy (Halpern and Le Galès 2008b) or in French environmental policy (Halpern 2007).

8. See, for example, Directives on road vehicles emissions (70/220) or on lead in petrol (78/611), or to facilitate the movement and marketing of chemicals, pesticides and other dangerous substances (Directive 67/548).

9. On the use of Framework Directives in the environmental policy domain, see Jänicke et al. (2003).

10. The choice of a Framework Directive explains why few daughter directives had been adopted a decade later, while by the mid-1990s, the vast majority of dangerous substances were still not subject to specific values and targets.

11. One could argue that it contributed to blocking the emergence of an EU-style of regulation in the environmental domain (Kelemen 2000).

12. This process culminated in the preparations for and execution of the British Presidency of 1998 (Weale et al. 2000).

13. Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control Directive 96/61/EC.

14. On the notion of problematisation, see Callon (1986).

15. For a comparative analysis of the strategic uses made of mainstreaming in the urban, gender and environment policy domains, see Halpern et al. (2008).

16. Regulations (EC) of the EU Parliament and of the Council: No. 1829/2003 on genetically modified food and feed; No. 1830/2003 concerning the traceability and labelling of genetically modified food and feed.