Greening the European Union: An Introduction

Effective environmental protection requires the consideration of environmental consequences in all ‘technical planning and decision-making processes’ at national and Community level (OJ, 1973, p6). So stated the first Environmental Action Programme (EAP) of the European Community in 1973. In 1999, Environment Commissioner Margot Wallstrom described current integration strategies (adopted in the fifth EAP) as ‘the start of an important process… the beginning of a learning process in our thinking and attitudes’ (EWWE, 1999a, p12, emphasis added). For more than a quarter of a century, the issue of environmental policy integration (EPI) had been neglected in the European Union (EU), despite its widely recognized importance for environmental protection. This book traces the bottlenecks hampering effective EPI in Community and national policy-making and identifies possible opportunities and solutions for dealing with this problem.