Change as "Appropriate Adaptation": Administrative Adjustment to European Environmental Policy in Britain and Germany

This paper is looking at European environmental policy from the "second image reversed" perspective. Specifically, it investigates the conditions under which we see administrative change in the EU member states as a consequence of the implementation of EU environmental policies. We adopt a comparative research design analyzing the impact of four environmental policies in Britain and Germany to trace the conditions for adaptation in the context of different administrative structures and traditions. As a starting hypothesis we adopt the institutionalist expectation that administrative adaptation depends on the "goodness of fit" between European policy requirements and existing national structures and procedures. On the basis of our empirical evidence we further refine the notion of "goodness of fit" by looking at the level of embeddedness of national structures in the overall administrative tradition from a static and dynamic perspective. Furthermore, we develop an explanatory framework that links sociological and rational choice variants of institutional analysis

"Policy and Institutional Change in the European Community: Environment Integration in the CAP"

What conditions are responsible for policy change or continuity in the European Community? This is the general research questions guiding the empirical case study presented in this paper. European sectoral policies are-at varying degrees-in the process of integrating environmental considerations into their cores. This process has been delayed and of marginal effect in the context of the CAP. I argue in this paper that institutional structures, on the European and national levels, and the ideational history of the CAP are responsible for the relative continuity of the CAP. Triggered by a novel historical context in the mid-1980s, new institutional dynamics have emerged and the historical "path" of the CAP had been partly redirected, though. The new institutional and ideational conditions provided "access points" for policy reformers and altered previous occupation patterns of the Community's "veto points", tilting the complex decision chain of the EC in favor of policy reform. However, environmental reformers were dependent on a broad reform coalition, capable of competing with the powerful agricultural interest. In this context, environmental interests were pursued often indirectly and always as a part of a larger rural policy agenda which attributed no particular priority to the environment. The "dependent" environmental integration strategy allowed environmentalists to place a foot in the door, but it has failed to create an environmentally sustainable CAP and even favorable conditions for future reforms

Transformation in European Environmental Governance

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020

Global Competition and EU Environmental Policy. The World Trade Dimension of 'Greening' the EC's Common Agricultural Policy

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020

Greening of the EC regional and cohesion funds : explaining variation across similar policy areas

First made available online on 17 March 202

Variation in EC environmental policy integration : agency push within complex institutional structures

The principle of environmental policy integration (EPI) has been adopted by the European Community and gained priority status in its fifth Environmental Action Programme. This article investigates the reasons for considerable variation in applying this principle by comparing the experience of environmental policy integration in two 'most similar' although differently evolving cases: the European Regional Development Fund and the Cohesion Fund. I argue that in order to explain substantial environmental improvement in the former case and poor compliance with the EPI principle in the latter, it is necessary to place the complex actor constellations and networks in the Community in their (micro)institutional framework. The policy network framework helps to recognize the role of actor interdependencies and chains that allowed environmental NGOs to play an influential role in the context of the Regional Fund reforms. (Micro)institutional analysis, in turn, points to the constraints experienced by a similar NGO campaign in the case of the Cohesion Fund and the opportunities opened up by recent institutional changes