Explaining the Lacking Success of EU Environmental Policy

Transcription

1 EXAM ASSIGNMENT REGIONAL INTEGRATION AND THE EU SUMMER 2012 Explaining the Lacking Success of EU Environmental Policy Regional Integration and the EU Josephine Baum Jørgensen STUs: 22709

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction Historical Overview... 3 Evolution of EU Environmental Policy Theoretical Discussion; Success and Failures of EU Environmental Policy... 4 Neofunctionalism ( Supranational Activism )... 4 Intergovernmentalism (Implementation and Integration Gaps ) Analysis; Corporate Lobbyism in EU Environmental Policy... 7 Types and Capacities of Interest Organizations... 8 Resource Dependencies and Institutional Opportunities... 9 Conclusion INTRODUCTION As of minor importance to the European Economic Community s agenda for creating a common institutional framework around economic issues, EU environmental policy was not established as an official policy area until the first Environmental Action Programme in In the following decades, EU environmental policy experienced rapid development and succeeded in obtaining a solid spot on the policy agenda as well as gathering support from the public. Nonetheless, EU environmental policy has, at the same time, met its challenges; the partial reluctance of member states to give up sovereignty to the EU institutions, the insecurity about the long-term implications of the common environmental framework as well as the external pressures of national and European business interest groupings. The core research of this paper is thus: Taking into account the remarkable increase in the political attention given to environmental issues from the first EAP (1973) to the Amsterdam Treaty (1997), how can we explain the lacking success of the EU environmental policy and does corporate lobbying play a possible role? The paper is divided into in three parts. In the first section, I will present an overview of the history of EU environmental policy. In the following section, I will address the first part of the research question through a theoretical discussion of two main integration theories and their ability of reasoning the successes and/or failures of EU environmental policy verifying the hypothesis, that, while the neofunctionalist approach succeeds in explaining the early evolution of EU environmental policy, the intergovernmentalist approach succeeds in explaining the more recent challenges of EU Page 2 of 11

3 environmental policy, leading to (in part) policy failure. In the third section, I will address the last part of the research question through an analysis of the dimension and affect of corporate lobbying in EU environmental policy and discuss the emergence of these patterns by the use of governance and networks theories (public networks and epistemic communities) verifying the hypothesis, that business interests, given their increased access to the EU institutions, pose a possible challenge to EU environmental policy. In the fourth and last section, I will conclude my findings. 1. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW The purpose of this section is to put the development of EU environmental policy into a historical context; to give an overview of the political and institutional progress in the years during which, as a part of the policy agenda, the visibility of environmental issues increased. Since the creation of the first Environmental Action Programme (EAP) in 1973, environmental policy has officially been a part of the EU agenda. Due to being a threat to the common market and to an increasing awareness on environmental issues (such as pollution), politicians sought to transfer national environmental policy to the supranational level (Bache et al, 2011). In October 1972, the Heads of State in the member countries (of what was then called the European Economic Community, the EEC) met at the Paris European Summit, at which they agreed to urge the Commission to initiate an environmental action programme; the first EAP was then created the following year (1973) (Bache et al, 2011). In the following years (from the 1970s to the late 1980s), the second and third EAP was launched, and even though they established a common set of principles (e.g. the preventative and polluter-pays principles), these could not bear comparison with explicit Treaty provisions which were still absent from the environmental policy area. Despite the persistence of the Commission and the support it gained from the member states that had already set high-end environmental standards, the environmental policy at Community level seemed to fail (Bache et al, 2011). The adoption of the Single European Act (SEA) in 1987 finally formalized EU environmental policy (Bache et al, 2011). This new Treaty base sought to integrate environmental policy as a component of all other policies, as well as establishing the fundamental principles earlier set forward in the EAPs. Environmental policy at Community level continued its rapid development, boosted by the adoption of the SEA, the formation of several environmental agencies/forums (e.g. EEA in 1993) Page 3 of 11

4 and the expansion of environmental policy in the Commission by the creation of a new Directorate- General (DG Environment) (Bache et al, 2011). Accordingly, the Commission acted successfully as a policy entrepreneur in promoting environmental issues, and by its side the European Court of Justice (ECJ) besides emphasizing the limited role of the Commission as an initiator and promoter and its own as a solidifier on environmental policy placed the environmental policy of the Community on an equal footing with its economic grounds; the common market (cf. the Danish Bottle Case ) (Bache et al, 2011). The Maastricht Treaty, adopted in 1993, further established environmental policy as one of the main policy areas in the EU, by mentioning the policy in its opening Articles. At the practical level, the Maastricht Treaty transferred more and more environmental policy areas to be subject to QMV (Qualified Majority Voting) (except e.g. country planning, taxation, and energy choices kept at unanimity voting), and introduced the co-decision procedure as an alternative to the traditional cooperation procedure (Bache et al, 2011). At the time when the Amsterdam Treaty was adopted, almost all areas of environmental policy legislation were treated by the co-decision procedure, and the powers of the European Parliament (as a co-decider) had thus increased remarkably (Bache et al, 2011). Environmental policy had become the latitude of the EU institutions, placing itself on the top of the policy agenda alongside the other important issues of primarily economic nature. 2. THEORETICAL DISCUSSION; SUCCESSES AND FAILURES The purpose of the following section is to reason the evolution of EU environmental policy and to establish the extent to which the policy has succeeded and/or failed. I will make use of two main integration theories; state-centrism/intergovernmentalism and neofunctionalism, each providing their own perspective on the complex relationship between and respective roles of the EU institutions and member states in EU environmental policy-making. Neofunctionalism As a direct challenge to the realistic approach that had been dominating the theory of International Relations (IR) during the 1950s, the scholars Haas (1958), Lindberg (1963), and Schmitter (1970) seized the occasion of the newly established European Community (EC) to develop a theory of European integration, namely neofunctionalism. Inspired by the earlier works of Mitrany (1943) and Monnet (1962) on functional-federalism, neofunctionalism became one of the main theories on Eu- Page 4 of 11

5 ropean Integration (Bache et al, 2011) thus, a theory which is still applicable to the understanding of the evolution of the EU policies, and amongst them, environmental policy. In the context of EU environmental policy, the theory of neofunctionalism stresses the importance of spillover political, functional, cultivated, and exogenous spillover (Bache et al, 2011). The concept explains how, once taking initial steps towards integration, the process continues and provides the basis for further integration. Looking at environmental policy, the uncontrolled and nonharmonized action taken on MS-level during the late 1960s turned out to be a threat to the initial goal of economic integration (the common market) in the Community. Thus, action regarding environmental policy had to be transferred to the Community-level, indicating that, as the sovereign powers of the MSs were decreasing, more and more political issues became the competency of the EU institutions. And as will be examined further below, the expanded latitude of the European Commission, Parliament, and Court of Justice paved the way for a pro-integrationist and successful creation of EU environmental policy. Supranational Activism The theory of neofunctionalism accommodates the importance of the supranational EU institutions in advancing environmental policy. First, it describes how the Commission quickly complied with the request of the Council by taking up the challenge of drafting the first EAP and promoting environmental issues. In its prominent role as a purposeful opportunist and policy entrepreneur, the Commission extended the scope of EU competencies to include environmental policy and provided the MSs with far-reaching directives (Jordan, 1999a). Second, it explains how the power of the European Parliament has increased through the co-operation and co-decision procedures and the transfer of more environmental issues to QMV (instead of unanimity), taking away the ability of MSs to veto legislation they disapprove of. Last, it describes the role of the Court of Justice in supporting the Commission in its struggles with the Council of Ministers as well as displaying environmental leadership insisting that environmental protection was of such importance for the Community that, under certain circumstances, it could even justify measures that distorted trade (Leontitsis in Bache et al, 2011). Thus, neofunctionalism can be used to explain the successful development of environmental policy into a prominent policy on the EU political agenda as well as the ability of supranational institutions to initiate, decide and direct a common environmental goal for the EU. Page 5 of 11

6 Intergovernmentalism Hoffmann (1964) and other scholars put forward a counter-argument to the neofunctionalist approach of emphasizing the role of supranational institutions, and sought instead to theorize European integration through the roles of (the governments of) sovereign states (Bache et al, 2011). Intergovernmentalism criticized, among other parts of the neofunctionalist approach, the downgrading of national governments to underlie the Community s institutions as well as the absent distinction between less important policy-areas and the more important high politics (regarding the effects of spillover). In the context of EU environmental policy, intergovernmentalists stress the way in which the national governments of the MSs influence the policy. They argue that the power of the supranational institutions is simply given to them by the MSs. Despite further arguments regarding e.g. the sustained importance of unanimity voting on areas such as taxation and energy use, there are not many pure intergovernmentalist analyses of EU environmental policy. Instead, other state-centric approaches have been widely used; the analysis of the leaders and laggards and the theory of fit or misfit (Bache et al, 2011). The latter is of more interest, since it introduces an interesting way of understanding the incentive behind actions of the MSs in environmental policy-making; to minimize costs, the national governments of the MSs seek and attempt to transfer their own environmental policy to the EU-level (Bache et al, 2011). Thus, the more the overall EU environmental policy fits the MSs own environmental policy, the less costly will it be to implement specific legislation. The Implementation Gap Despite the dramatically increasing attention given to the policy area at EU level (cf. Historical Overview ), environmental policy has faced a serious hardship at its implementation phase in the MSs, (...) making the environment one of the worst-performing policy areas in the EU (Leontitsis in Bache et al, 2011). Because most environmental legislation passed at EU-level is designed as directives, it is the task of the Member-State governments to transpose the directives into specific national law and as is the experience with environmental legislation, the MSs take on this task very differently and some do not always take the appropriate action: Research shows that many states still do not even bother to tell the Commission what they are doing to transpose EU law into national law, while some are deliberately obstructive (Jordan, 1999a). This implementation deficit constitutes an even greater problem, given that the Commission (DG Environment, Climate etc.) Page 6 of 11

7 often lacks resources to perform its role of watch-dog of the implementation phase of EU legislation as Jordan (1999a) puts it: This means that in the very places that EU policy needs to bite - factories, river banks, beaches and so on - the Commission has little direct presence and virtually no direct influence. Thus, the state-centric and intergovernmentalist approach, in which (the governments of) the MSs are in focus and decide the pace of EU environmental policy, helps explain this main issue of the implementation gap. The Policy Integration Gap The idea that environmental policy should be integrated in all other policies of the EU was formally established by Article 130R(2) in SEA in the mid-1980s. Recent developments have shown that, instead of producing new environmental legislation, effort is made to green all other EU policies (Bache et al, 2011). Still, problems to this process have arisen: the policy integration gap, which can partly be explained by the intergovernmentalist approach. The intergovernmentalist approach argues that MSs choose to move their own interests to the EU-level (only) in so far as it pays off to them thus, as the interests of the MSs change over time, so does the prioritization of issues on the political agenda of the EU. As Leontitsis (in Bache et al, 2011) argues; By late 2002, the production of new strategies and/or updating of existing ones had all but ceased, and the entire process began to move into the shadow of the newly emerging Lisbon process on social and economic reform. Thus, as expressed in the Lisbon Agenda, when MSs wished to focus more on economic and social issues (the two pillars introduced), it logically followed that other issues such as environmental policy were placed lower on the political agenda. What further create obstacles to environmental policy integration, are the policy areas where unanimity still applies and the MSs have the ability to veto policy greening. 3. ANALYSIS; CORPORATE LOBBYISM The purpose of the following section is to analyze the extent to which corporate lobbyism affects EU environmental policy. I will make use of the arguments put forward by Eising (2007) to explain the access of business interests to influence EU environmental policy as well as discussing the emergence of these access patterns through governance and network theories; epistemic communities and policy networks. Page 7 of 11

8 In the article The Access of Business Interests to EU Institutions: Towards Èlite Pluralism? (2007), Eising seeks to explain the access patterns of business interests in relation to the EU institutions. Eising (2007) bases his theory on the earlier works of Meyneaud and Sidjanski (1971) and Bouwen (2002) and concludes (...) that access patterns are shaped by resource dependencies, institutional opportunities, and the capacities of the interest organizations (Eising, 2007). Types and Capacities of Interest Organizations Many scholars consider the access of interest groups to the EU institutions as important because systematic variations in these access patterns can result in biased politics (Eising, 2007). Since the creation of the Single Market increasing the regulatory powers of the EU institutions organizations of business interests have intensified their multi-level lobbying in an attempt to influence EU policy (Lehmann et al, 2003). Being well aware that many other organized interests (including e.g. environmental organizations) exist in the EU environmental policy area, I have chosen to focus only on the interest organizations specified below due to the limited remit of the assignment. The interest organizations I wish to examine are thus narrowed down to four types; business associations, corporate lobbying consultancy firms, organizations of experts (epistemic communities) and individual firms be they national or European, large or small (Bache et al, 2011). As Eising argues, the capacities of these interest organizations are a crucial factor in determining their access to the EU institutions; the larger the organization and the larger the control over substantial resources, the larger the representation of their interests in environmental policy-making (Eising, 2007). It is not possible to generalize on the capacities of organizations of business interests in the EU, since each association, company, etc., have very different resources available and may vary in their devotion of those resources to lobbyism. Though, as Lehmann et al (2003) argues, there has been a rising tendency towards companies actively joining European business groups, e.g. the prominent BUSI- NESSEUROPE or the European Round Table of Industrialists, to pursue their goals collectively and gain the advantage of fused resources. These business groups may resemble the so-called epistemic communities ; networks of experts on a particular policy domain with an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within that domain (Bache et al, 2011). They have the ability to access EU decision-makers and get particular influence over the policy process when high uncertainty exists around the policy-area as with en- Page 8 of 11

9 vironmental policy. As a result, the more established of these business groups tend to be invited to participate in different EU policy forums, suggesting the development of an inner core of policymakers and the institutionalization of big-business in the EU policy process (Lehmann et al, 2003). This tendency towards a more fluid and complex model of governance (Bache et al, 2011) harmonizes well with the theoretical perspective of the policy networks. This theory of governance focuses on the introduction of new players and forums in the development and execution of EU environmental policy (Bache et al, 2011). Resource Dependencies and Institutional Opportunities As Eising argues, the access patterns of business interests (the four types mentioned earlier) in relation to the EU institutions result from resource dependencies (Eising, 2007). An exchange takes place between organized interests and the EU institutions, and the asset/resource exchanged is information. As resource dependencies clarify the motivation (for both parties) behind this exchange paradigm, it presents a relevant perspective in the analysis of the extent to which business interests have access to EU environmental policy. First of all, EU institutions are highly dependent on expert knowledge on technology (provided mainly by firms) as well as on information on the national and European encompassing interest (provided mainly by business associations) as stated by Eising (2007): ( ) some authors maintain that political money in the EU is information because their organi- zational features make for the dependence of the EU institutions on external advice (Eising, 2007). The latter, the encompassing interest, is especially important for the EU institutions to lay down realistic and long-lasting legislation on environmental issues (to be integrated into all other EU policies). On the other hand, it is in the interests of the national/european firms, business associations, etc., to obtain information about the prospects of EU environmental policy; the legislation, decided upon among the EU institutions and later to be implemented in the MSs, can either have beneficial or costly consequences (e.g. in terms of the choice of strategies, investment decisions, etc.) (Eising, 2007). According to Eising (2007), the structures and competencies of the different EU institutions present another perspective in this analysis; the incentives and opportunities of business interest to influence EU environmental policy (Eising, 2007). The many institutions and multi-level system of the EU constitute different routes and access points for business interests to influence EU environmental policy. The Commission is commonly seen as the primary access point when it comes to lobby- Page 9 of 11

10 ing; its role as sole initiator of legislation makes it an obvious target of business interest (Eising, 2007). Furthermore, according to Bache et al (2007), a lobbying project has more successful prospects the earlier the initial contact is taken. Depending on the nature of their concerns, interest organizations access the different DGs and Commissioners on an EU level in different ways; , phone calls, meetings etc. (Reyes et al, 2011). Despite its role of policy entrepreneur in the early years of EU environmental policy, the Commission has turned out to support business interests (above environmental interests) in a number of cases (cf. the Danish Bottle Case ) (Bache et al, 2011). Thus, it is underlined that the economic DGs (Trade, Competition, Enterprise etc.) experience size advantages to DG Environment which sometimes fails to gain broader support within the College of Commissioners (Bache et al, 2011). Furthermore, the implementation of the complaints procedure and bottom-up approach has eased the access of business interests among other non-state players to influence EU environmental policy. Business interests also have the potential for lobbying the European Parliament but despite its increasing role in environmental policy-making, the EP is often seen very much as a secondary arena for interest organizations (Eising, 2007). The Council, due to its important role in EU environmental legislation, is almost as relevant an access point as the Commission with one essential difference; companies and business associations mainly lobby on the national level, i.e. address their interests and concerns regarding the EU environmental policy to national governments (Eising, 2007). Many of the Council s dayto-day decisions are taken by COREPER I and II, consisting mainly of national experts. CORE- PER I and II constitute yet another access point for business interests to lobby EU environmental policy. CONCLUSION This assignment examines the lacking success of EU environmental policy and whether corporate lobbying is a possible contributory factor. As accounted for in the first section, EU environmental policy has experienced rapid growth in the years between the first EAP in 1973 and the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997, and has succeeded in establishing itself as a prominent policy on the EU political agenda. The second section accounts for a more bilateral view on the evolution of EU environmental policy through the use of two main integration theories: neofunctionalism and intergovernmentalism. The neofunctionalist approach accounts mainly for the early successes of EU environmental policy; the establishment of the supranational institutions (EP, EC and ECJ) as well as their ability to initiate, decide and direct a common environmental policy goal. The intergovernmentalist (and Page 10 of 11

11 state-centric) approach accounts mainly for the more recent failures of EU environmental policy; as the member states are the key arbiters in deciding the pace and direction of the policy, challenges arise regarding the implementation and policy integration of legislation made at EU-level. The third section accounts for the extent to which corporate lobbyism affects EU environmental policy. First, business interests tend to pool resources and form alliances to increase their access to the EU decision-makers. Second, as resource-dependencies motivate business groups and EU institutions to collaborate (cf. the exchange paradigm ), institutional opportunities provide explicit access points for business interests to influence EU environmental policy amplifying the extent to which business interests pose a possible threat to EU environmental policy. Thus, despite increased attention to environmental issues on the EU policy agenda from 1973 to 1997, environmental policy has in recent years faced several challenges in the form of institutional issues and political pressures contributing to the lacking success of the policy; the implementation gap, the policy integration gap and an increase in the external pressures of business interests. BIBLIOGRAPHY Bache, Ian et al (2011): Politics in the European Union, 3rd edition, Oxford University Press: Leontitsis, Vasilis: Environmental Policy, pages Eising, Rainer (2007): The Access of Business Interests to EU Institutions: Towards Élite Pluralism?, Journal of the European Public Policy vol. 14(3), pages , T&F Online: Jordan, Andrew et al (1999): European Union Environmental Policy at 25, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy vol. 17: Jordan, Andrew (1999a), The construction of a multilevel environmental governance system Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 17(1). Jordan, Andrew (1999b), The implementation of EU environmental policy: a policy problem without a political solution? Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy 17(1). Lehmann, Wilhelm et al (2003): Lobbying in the European Union: Current Rules and Practices, European Parliament (Luxembourg), Constitutional Affairs Series. Reyes, Oscar et al (2011): Caught in the Cross-Hairs; How Industry Lobbyists are Gunning for EU Climate Targets, Corporate Europe Observatory Page 11 of 11