Understanding sustainability policy: governance, knowledge and the search for integration

Abstract

The EU, through the Cardiff and the Gothenburg strategies, sought to counter what was seen as fragmented and uncoordinated environmental policy development by promoting a broad and integrated approach to sustainability. This article seeks to assess two recently implemented EU directives on environmental issues in light of this aim, namely the directives on Air Quality Management and Strategic Environmental Assessment. Drawing on theoretical foundations and empirical evidence from the EU FP6 project ‘Governance for Sustainability’, this article seeks to understand how policy integration is a matter of knowledge use, which is again related to the governance arrangements in which implementation takes place. Drawing on a total of 15 case studies in nine countries, the article finds that actual decision-making practice varies a lot albeit based on the same directives. In many cases, the directives were viewed as a sectoral ‘environmental tools’, and these cases were often dominated by expert knowledge being funnelled through relatively closed, hierarchical governance arrangements. In other cases, however, the directives were viewed as opportunities for politicians to cultivate a network mode of governance that ‘aspired’ to arguing and sometimes opened up for competing knowledge claims.

Keywords:

• Sustainability
• policy
• governance
• knowledge
• integration

Notes

Given the fact that the word ‘environment’ is not mentioned in the treaty of Rome, it could not be used in EU legislation until 1987. Nevertheless, the EU did have policies and legislation governing environmental issues prior to this, but under different headings.

Source: EUR-Lex.

The theoretical framework and concepts used in this section build on the G-FORS Theoretical Framework. A condensed version of the discussion can be found in Atkinson et al. (2010b) and Heinelt et al. (2010).

The relative locations of the UK and German SEA cases appear to contradict Héritier et al. (1996) who suggest that Germany had more problems than the UK in adapting to this procedural-based approach, in part, because the UK ‘inspired’ the EU to develop such an approach and was therefore more at ease with such an approach. While this may have been the case, it is sensible to bear in mind Wurzel's (2002, p. 5) point that ‘… a state's position on the environmental leader-laggard dimension may vary over time;… national policy approaches do not remain immutable, although they are adapted only incrementally’. To this, we might add that the Federal structure of Germany gives sub-national government greater autonomy to adopt their own particular approach compared to the UK which, despite recent reforms, still retains a more highly centralized and stratified system of governance.

Such limit values have been in place since 1983, when the first EU legislation on air pollution control came into force. Directive 80/779/EWG. See also Löber (2010).

Although of course there is a strong argument that one of the reasons for the existence of sub-national government is to allow policies to be adapted to local needs.

However, we would not wish to argue that this leads to no change, there were indications in some of our case studies (e.g. in Milan and the Polish SEA case study) that changes were, slowly, taking place allowing for the development of new governance arrangements and the introduction of forms of knowledge previously excluded.