Learning within the European Commission: the case of environmental integration

Abstract

This article analyses how the Directorates-General for Transport and Energy (DG TREN) and for Enterprise (DG ENTR) of the European Commission reacted to the demand to integrate environmental aspects into their activities. In doing so, we study the DGs – as suborganizations within an organization – through the lenses of organizational learning concepts. To reveal if, and to what extent, the observed reactions of both DGs towards environmental integration can be described as organizational learning, we develop a heuristic model that allows for a distinction between single-loop and double-loop learning as well as between compliant and non-compliant learning. Our empirical study detects different types of organizational learning by DG TREN and DG ENTR in three time periods between 1986 and 2004. Furthermore, our analysis shows that the modified strategies to foster environmental integration by the DG for Environment were important triggers for organizational learning in both DGs.

Keywords:

• Environmental integration
• European Commission
• organizational learning
• sustainable development

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank Detlef Sack for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article, Tamara Brown and James Hudson for making the text more readable and coherent and three anonymous reviewers for useful and constructive critiques. The authors are especially grateful to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and CRC 597 for their financial support.

Parts of the article rely on our completed research project ‘The European Commission as a Learning Organization’ (Kopp-Malek et al. 2009).

Notes

At its meeting in Cardiff in June 1998, the European Council required different formations of the EU Council to integrate environmental considerations into their respective activities to put article 6 of the EC Treaty into practice. Also, the European Council requested the Commission to support this course of action, which was later known as ‘Cardiff Process’.

Theoretically, it would make sense to differentiate between non-compliant learning in a single- and double-loop learning manner. But it seems empirically unfeasible to assess whether an organization just ignores a demand (non-learning) or whether it enforces its existing activities on the espoused theory level without questioning its theory-in-use (non-compliant single-loop learning). Hence, we understand non-compliant learning always as a conscious questioning of an organization with its core beliefs and basic assumption (theory-in-use), i.e. non-compliant learning is per definition double-loop learning.

Interview in DG ENV.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Interview in DG TREN. We decided to analyse transport and energy policy separately because the difference between both policy fields has been emphasized throughout the interviews. The difference between both policy fields is partly reflected in the organizational structure of DG TREN, e.g. the directorates, and even – although it is formally still one DG – two Commissioners were installed for the two separate policy areas after the enlargement of the EU.

For example, the Green Papers ‘For a European Union Energy Policy’ from 1994 or ‘Energy for the Future: Renewable Source of Energy’ from 1996 and the White Paper ‘An Energy Policy for the European Union’ from 1995.

Ibid.

To facilitate reading, we speak in period III about DG TREN, although the merger did not occur until 2000.

Interview in DG TREN.

To improve the readability, we speak of DG ENTR, even though it was named DG III until 2000.

Interview in DG ENTR.

Ibid.

Ibid.