European environmental policy at 50: Five decades of escaping decision traps?

Abstract

Rather than being constrained by the least ambitious governments, the European Union (EU) has until recently set the pace of national environmental policy. The contribution examines why the EU was often able to set the pace despite the institutionalist expectation that national diversity and quasi-unanimity should produce joint-decision traps. It also explains why this is no longer the case. Adopting a long-term, diachronic perspective, I argue that the EU's unexpected dynamism and its recent decline are related to distinct institutional exits from the joint-decision trap that have opened and closed in different periods. During the emergence of the policy area, diversity was manageable through bargaining, and joint gains were abundant.Between the late 1980s and the Eastern enlargement, as environmental policy was increasingly adopted under the community method, supranational intervention became an additional exit mechanism, with an activist European Parliament and strong agenda setting by the Commission. Since mid-2000, the green dynamism is in decline, as supranational interventions wane and bargaining solutions become insufficient to cope with increased diversity after enlargement, exacerbated by the economic crisis. However, nonpolitical lawmaking in the regulatory mode is emerging as a novel exit from the joint-decision trap.

Do European firms obey the rules? Environmental innovativeness in light of institutional frameworks

“…The European Union (EU) sets ambitious targets in order to motivate environmental policy in its member states (Deters 2019). Resource efficiency is of pivotal interest for European policy (European Commission 2008, 2010, 2011b, 2015, not only for environmental reasons, but as a way to improve competitiveness in the marketplace.…”

Resilience of the EU ETS to contextual disturbance: the case of EU enlargement and its impact on ETS policymaking dynamics

“…The analysis of the institutional dynamics resonates with the literature that the enlargement did not slow down the EU environmental legislation or create a policy gridlock (Parízek et al 2015, Toshkov 2017, Burns 2019, Deters 2019, Wurzel et al 2019). But we also examined how supranational EU institutions have adapted the ETS legislation to the enlargement.…”

Are EU Institutions Still Green Actors? An Empirical Study of Green Public Procurement

“…And our results confirm the EC's low appetite for GPP. Anchoring our results in a broader debate, the Commission decision‐making in the field of environmental policies has undergone significant modifications marked by a decreasing green dynamism (Deters, 2019, p. 323). We find major differences between Juncker's and Barroso's Commission regarding GPP adoption.…”

“…In contrast, our evidence seems unequivocal in identifying the EC, the Council of the EU and the EU agencies, among others, as engaging in greenwashing. The logic of action among the latter seems to reflect the EU's declining green dynamism (Deters, 2019) and the ‘actorness’ displayed by the EC as it has shifted its stance over the last decade from actively supporting the expansion of environmental policies to openly supporting their active dismantling (Gravey and Jordan, 2020). If the EC does indeed, hereon in, choose to support rather than oppose this process of dismantling, then its remaining adversaries will comprise the greener Member States and the EP – a much‐diminished coalition.…”

“…The EC, which has the monopoly on legislative initiatives, has recognized the introduction of environmental criteria as one of the objectives of its environmental policy. Yet Deters (2019) recently noted a declining activism on the part of the EC with regard to the EU's green dynamism (Deters, 2019, p. 323). This would go some way to explaining why, in the negotiating process to adopt the 2014 Directive, the EC was seen to hold fairly conservative views on GPP (Semple, 2018; Czarnezki, 2020).…”