Producing public goods in the EU: European integration processes in the fields of refugee protection and climate stability

ABSTRACT

In recent years, the EU has experienced different integration ‘crises’ in its policy domains. Some policy fields such as the environment have been driven by an integration process of consensus among the Member States while others, such as migration and asylum policy, have not reached a high level of integration because of differences between the states. Although some scholars have attempted to identify the dynamics of integration processes in the EU through political theories such as neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism, these theories may not be helpful to explain the lack of integration seen in the last several years in migration and asylum policy. To identify some of the dynamics of EU collective action and its influence on the European integration process (or the reverse), this paper proposes to analyse EU environmental policy and EU refugee protection policy through the lens of public goods theory. Analysis of the production process of public goods, in this case, as refugee protection and climate stability, gives interesting insight into the different levels of integration in both policy domains.

KEYWORDS:

• EU integration
• public goods
• refugee protection
• climate stability
• environmental policy
• refugee policy
• asylum policy

Notes

1 We assume that the EU integration process determines the provision of European public goods, nevertheless it is reciprocal as the provision of public goods may be analysed by determining the deficit of integration in a specific policy domain.

2 According to Kaul and Le Goulven (2003, p. 374) ‘the production process involves assembling and implementing the numerous inputs that a good typically requires (…). The building blocks of global public goods can comprise local, national, regional, and international inputs, contributions from various economic sectors, and contributions from various groups of actors: the state businesses, civil society organisations, and households’.

3 See Art. 4(2)(j) and Art. 2(2) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) 2016.

4 See Art. 78(2) TFEU 2016.

5 See Art. 2 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) 2016.