The European Union

Environmental policy integration: a state of the art review

“…By contrast, the three systems that arguably have done the most to implement EPI -namely the EU, Norway and Sweden -witnessed a reversal of earlier commitments to EPI after the political leadership changed (cf. Jordan et al, 2008;Lafferty et al, 2008;Nilsson and Persson, 2008). In the EU, the political commitment to the Cardiff Process waned in the early 2000s when the majority in the Council and the Commission turned to the right (Pallemaerts et al, 2006).…”

“…Germany, the USA and Australia (analysed by Wurzel (2008), Hoornbeek (2008) and Ross (2008)) -as well as the EU (Wilkinson, 2007;Jordan et al, 2008) have encountered signifi cant institutional obstacles to implementing EPI. On the other hand, in particular federations that leave the lower level some leeway in autonomously developing policy (that is, the EU, the USA and to some extent Australia) often feature innovative EPI instruments that were developed in a decentralized fashion (that is, at state or lower levels).…”

Mainstreaming international governance: The environment, gender, and IO performance in the European Union

“…Just as importantly for our purposes here, while the Lisbon Strategy was intended to incorporate environmental objectives, it rapidly became clear that environmental considerations took a back seat in the Lisbon guidelines to jobs and growth-a priority that was made explicit by the reform of the Strategy in 2005 to highlight jobs and growth over sustainability as the core aim of the effort (Jordan et al 2008). Despite its nominal inclusion of sustainable development considerations, the Lisbon Strategy would not prove to be an engine for environmental policy integration.…”

“…To some extent, this sectoral isolation proved a boon to EU environmental regulation, since EU environmental policymakers were able to adopt progressive regulation without interference from sectoral officials who might otherwise have acted as veto players and blocked or watered down proposed regulations (Hartlapp 2011). Yet this same fragmentation of the EU policy process also limited the prospects for integrating environmental considerations into other areas like agriculture, transport, and energy, which had major impacts on the environment, but over which environmental policy-makers exerted little influence (Jordan et al 2008). EPI, 1983EPI, -1992 The Commission, and particularly DG Environment, was well aware of this dilemma, and proposed, with increasing explicitness over the years, the integration of environmental concerns into sectoral policy-making.…”

“…Because cross-cutting mandates require implementation across many different issue-areas and units within IOs, however, such outcomes are often difficult to achieve. This is particularly true in an IO like the European Union (EU), which takes in a large number of sectoral policies and is deeply "pillarized," with strong sectoral Directorates-General (DGs) and with an intergovernmental Council of Ministers also organized along sectoral lines (Jordan et al 2008: 161, Hartlapp 2011. As a result, we argue, global norms such as gender mainstreaming or environmental policy integration are most likely to change the substance of IO policy when their implementation serves elite bureaucratic self-interest.…”