an ‘ever closer union’ of national policy? the convergence of national environmental policy in...

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

European EnvironmentEur. Env. 15, 102–113 (2005)Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/eet.377

An ‘Ever Closer Union’ of National Policy? The Convergence ofNational Environmental Policy in the

European Union

Duncan Liefferink1 and Andrew Jordan2

1 Department of Environmental Policy Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

2 School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

ABSTRACTThis article examines how far the EU has succeeded in encouraging the content, struc-ture and style of national environmental policies to converge. Using fresh empiricalevidence collected from 10 national environmental policies, it presents a very mixedpattern of change, with some elements of national policy converging more rapidly(and through different causal pathways) than others. These findings are viewedthrough the lens of popular theories of structural convergence, integration and Europeanization respectively, to reach a fuller understanding of the pathways and outcomes of change in an enlarging EU. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltdand ERP Environment.

Received 28 September 2004; revised 22 December 2004; accepted 20 January 2005

Keywords: environmental policy; European Union; Europeanisation; national environmental policy; policy convergence

*Correspondence to: Dr. Duncan Liefferink, Department of Environmental Policy Sciences, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9108, NL-6500 HK Nijmegen, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]

Introduction

WITHIN JUST A FEW YEARS, THE IMPACT OF THE EUROPEAN UNION (EU) ON ITS MEMBER

states has become a major theme of EU studies. The recent introduction of the Euro in 12member states has been the ultimate proof for many citizens that the EU really does ‘matter’,by putting a ‘little piece of Europe’ into their pocket. Researchers now seem unanimously

to agree that European integration has some impact upon domestic politics, policies and administrativestructures. Under the label of ‘Europeanization’, a group of scholars has started to study precisely howfar European integration penetrates and, in certain circumstances, brings about adjustments to, domes-tic institutions, decision-making procedures and public policies (among many others Mény et al., 1996;Rometsch and Wessels, 1996; Cowles et al., 2001; Knill, 2001; Jordan, 2002; Olsen, 2002).

An ‘Ever Closer Union’ of National Policy? 103

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Eur. Env. 15, 102–113 (2005)

The purpose of this article is to address a slightly different but related question: if national policiesare ‘Europeanizing’ under the influence of the EU, does it necessarily imply that they are also becom-ing more similar? The convergence of national policies has puzzled scholars for considerably longerthan the Europeanization of national policies (e.g. Kerr, 1983; Unger and Van Waarden, 1995), but theEuropeanization ‘turn’ in EU studies has encouraged scholars to re-double their efforts to understandit. At first sight, the converging effect of the EU may appear obvious. If the EU member states decideupon an increasing number of issues together and all have to implement the resulting common poli-cies in their respective national systems, ceteris paribus, how could they not grow more alike? It must bekept in mind, however, that the EU did not start with a blank canvas. Consequently, an obvious ques-tion to ask is which parts are being changed and to what extent, and if they are changed are there trendscommon to most or all member states? Or have starting positions been so different to ensure that the‘top down’ influence from Brussels has worked out differently in each national context?

This article will explore the extent to which the EU contributes to a process of secular convergence ofnational environmental policy. For the sake of convenience, by ‘national policy’, we mean the content ofpolicies (including the paradigms and goals of action, the instruments and the precise setting or cali-bration of those instruments; cf. Hall, 1993), the institutional structures, as well as the dominant stylesof interaction.1 In the next section we discuss some basic conceptual and methodological problems ofstudying convergence in the context of the EU. We show that theories predicting either convergence ordivergence are not actually sufficiently sophisticated or specific to account for the complex patterns ofEuropeanization we have observed in the member states. For that reason, in the third section we focuson possible mechanisms of convergence that may be operating in the EU. The fourth section presentsselected findings of a recent study of the Europeanization of environmental policy in 10 EU memberstates (Jordan and Liefferink, 2004), focusing on the extent to which Europeanization in this field hascontributed to significant policy convergence at the national level. The final section analyses these find-ings in the light of different theories in an attempt to draw some wider conclusions about the extent of– and future prospects for – convergence in the EU.

Europeanization and Convergence: Problems of Causality

The leading question of this article is to what extent the impact of the EU on its member states leads toa secular convergence of national policies and politics. This question is more complicated than it imme-diately appears. Basically, convergence is the expected effect and Europeanization its suggested cause. Con-firming the relevance of this causal chain, however, brings with it at least two analytical problems. First,it may be wondered whether the effect – the convergence of national policies – really exists. Second, ifconvergence is occurring, a wide variety of factors can be supposed to be responsible for it, ranging frombroad cultural or socio-economic change to the specific impact of international institutions such as theEU. How can we disentangle the role of European integration (i.e. ‘Europeanization’) from other factors?

First, does convergence really take place? In order to ‘measure’ the convergence of national policies,one needs to compare political change in at least two countries and assess to what extent they are becom-ing more similar. In order to reduce the impact of sheer coincidence (i.e. changes that run parallel indifferent countries but with unrelated ‘national’ causes), a larger sample of countries is normally prefer-

1 It should be noted that this article does not address policy outcomes, i.e. the actual changes in environmental quality brought about by theEU’s interventions. Even if policies in the EU member states are becoming similar, this gives little indication as to whether their environ-mental effects will also converge. Investigation of the complex causal chains involved here (including for instance the degree and quality ofimplementation of policies on the ground, the influence of other policies as well various non-policy factors ranging) goes far beyond the scopeof this study.

104 D. Liefferink and A. Jordan

able to low-n studies. Furthermore, as we are most probably dealing here with long-term processes, thecomparison should also cover a sufficiently long time span. Obviously, however, an empirical, inductiveapproach is going to be fairly undirected. National ‘policy’ is a multi-faceted concept, ranging from theposition of the Prime Minister to the degree of local autonomy and from budgets to negotiation styles.It is unclear in advance where analysts should look for evidence of convergence. An approach led by aset of theoretical expectations regarding the possible converging effect of Europeanization (or any otherfactor, for that matter) could help to make the dependent variable more tractable. This, however, leadsus to a second problem.

Research in the field of Europeanization has boomed in recent years, but so far it has not succeededin providing specific theories of how the process runs and what its effects are. In fact, even the meaningof the term ‘Europeanization’ is still contested (cf. the helpful discussion by Buller and Gamble, 2002).In this article, as in most other recent studies, we treat European integration as a factor that causesEuropeanization in the sense of a ‘top down’ impact on politics and policies at the member state level (see,e.g., Radaelli, 1997; Bulmer and Burch, 2000; Boerzel, 2002; Knill, 2001; Jordan, 2002). However, thisperspective immediately raises the problem of causality. On a time-scale of, say, 10 to 20 years, it is certainly not hard to find instances of fundamental political change in every EU member state, but it isconsiderably more difficult to identify the causes behind such change. Here we might include electoralshifts, domestic socio-economic change (economic growth, shifts in the economic structure etc.), cul-tural shifts (e.g. the increase of post-materialist values), the globalization of culture and economy etc.‘Europe’ is likely to be just one of these factors, which, to make things even more complicated, may beexpected to work in a closely interrelated way. As Klaus Goetz has correctly pointed out, if scholars arenot alert to these difficulties, Europeanization research could easily become ‘a cause in search of aneffect’ (Goetz, 2001a, p. 211).

Against this background, current research on Europeanization has so far remained fairly ad hoc. Theonly way to circumvent the problem of causality, it seems, has been to resort to thorough and detailedempirical research. Thus, recent studies have focused on one or a limited number of member states(Liefferink, 1996; Radaelli, 1997; Knill, 2001; Boerzel, 2002), and/or on specific aspects of the nationstate, such as sub-national government (Boerzel, 2002), administrative structures (Bulmer and Burch,2000; Kassim et al., 2000, 2001; Goetz, 2001a, 2001b; Jordan, 2002, 2003) or national parliaments(Maurer and Wessels, 2001). More often than not, these studies cut across a number of policy sectors.Consequently, the picture emerging from this literature lacks resolution. That said, the conventionalwisdom has it that the impact of the EU on domestic policies is highly differentiated, both along policysectors and along countries. Notably, there is an emerging consensus that the content of national poli-cies (that is instruments, standards etc.) are affected in a more pronounced way than national politicalinstitutions and working styles (cf. many of the references above). This should, of course, not be entirelysurprising, as the EU’s basic way of working is to issue concrete policy measures in the form of direc-tives and regulations, which then have to be implemented by the member states. This, in turn, can havean indirect effect on national operational structures and styles.

However, Europeanization cannot simply be equated with convergence. The impact of Europe can infact just as well be so differential (Héritier et al., 2001) as to lead to persistence or even divergence amongpreviously similar member states (Van Waarden, 1995). Generally speaking (i.e. irrespective of the spe-cific role of the EU in this context), two schools of thought on the extent and mechanisms of policy con-vergence can be distinguished. On the one hand, sociological institutionalist theory claims thatorganizations tend to become similar as they struggle to become more isomorphic with their operatingenvironment (Meyer and Rowan, 1977). What is at stake here is not only a functionalist mechanism bywhich the character of a policy problem triggers certain types of policy solution. Rather, organizationsseek to be successful by adhering to cultural norms that are commonly perceived to be appropriate and



legitimate (Peters, 1999, pp. 102–103). In the environmental policy sector, a broad social movement (i.e.environmentalism) and ideas associated with ecological modernization (Spaargaren and Mol, 1992)could have acted together as a ‘cultural nucleus’. Spread, among others, by the EU (Weale, 1993), it couldconceivably account for an increasingly common way of organizing environmental policies in themember states. By contrast, historical institutional theory stresses the resilience of national policies andinstitutions against outside pressures. These arrangements are said to be very deeply rooted in nationalhistory. In fact, it is this sense of permanence that makes them legitimate in the eyes of national actors(March and Olsen, 1989).

Sociological and historical institutionalisms offer two competing hypotheses regarding the possibleeffect of the EU on national policies. While the former predicts convergence, the latter predicts diver-gence/persistence. As demonstrated above, however, the rapidly developing empirical literature suggesta much more differentiated pattern is emerging, with convergence in some respects and persistence (oreven divergence) in others. Therefore, these two bodies of theory manifestly fail to account for whatappears to be a differentiated pattern of national change.

Mechanisms of Convergence in the EU

This paper tries to deal with the problem of causality in the following way. In the absence of proper the-oretical indicators of where to look for unambiguous instances of EU-induced convergence, we opt foran inductive approach. First, in order to avoid the risk of over-attributing outcomes to the EU, we startfrom a number of instances of political change in the member states where the impact of the EU vis-à-vis other causal factors is at least highly plausible from the outset (see below). This is accomplished by taking the cases from a set of detailed studies analysing the impact of the EU vis-à-vis other (domes-tic and international) forces on national environmental policy in 10 countries (Jordan and Liefferink,2004). For these cases, we will explore to what extent they have actually led to convergence between the member states, although space constraints do not allow us to describe the cases in detail. Second,in order not to get stuck in the mutually exclusive, ‘dead end’ explanations of sociological and historical institutionalism respectively, we will focus not on the fundamental causes of convergence, butrather on the possible mechanisms by which the EU could have brought about the observed effects (seebelow).

In a seminal article, Colin Bennett (1991) distinguished four general mechanisms that might inducenational policies to converge: emulation, elite networking, harmonization and penetration. More recentcontributions have elaborated upon, but not fundamentally departed from, Bennett’s original categories.Most conspicuously, there is a tendency to draw together emulation and elite networking under theterms of ‘emulation’ (Howlett, 2000) or ‘diffusion’ (Jörgens, 2003), as Bennett’s original categories arehard to separate both conceptually and empirically. Thus, in keeping with the rest of this special issue,we employ the triad of diffusion, harmonization and imposition for developing a set of expectations asto how the EU might foster convergence of national policies.

1. Following the definition by Rogers (1995, p. 5), diffusion refers to ‘the process by which an innova-tion is communicated through certain channels over time among the members of the social system’and includes both imitation and lesson drawing. This may happen for a wide variety of reasons.For instance, in situations of uncertainty or in order to increase the legitimacy of domestic policies,states may actively look for foreign examples (see further Busch and Jörgens, this issue).

2. Harmonization refers to the ‘deliberative and cooperative attempt by a particular set of countries tosolve problems which they are collectively confronted with’ (Jörgens, 2003, p. 5).




3. Imposition, somewhat more specifically than Bennett’s corresponding category, ‘involves onecountry being intentionally forced to adopt the policies favored by another country, by an interna-tional organization or by a private actor’ (Jörgens, 2003, p. 6).

As regards diffusion, Bennett suggests that both policy content and policy structure can be subject tolesson drawing and gives examples of policy goals, precise standards and special administrative agen-cies being modelled after foreign examples (Bennett, 1991, pp. 221–223). Interestingly, policy style is‘logically’ (i.e. a priori) excluded by Bennett from emulation (Bennett, 1991, p. 221), but this is difficultto maintain. For instance, there was a very rapid proliferation of consensus-seeking ‘round tables’ inCentral and Eastern Europe immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall that engendered a more openlydemocratic style of decision making in areas that had previously been communist. Rather, the problemis that style is often so closely associated with the institutions surrounding it (here the ‘round tables’)that it is hard to say where the learning process – if it can be demonstrated to have occurred at all –actually started. As Bennett points out, lesson drawing from others may be triggered by a number ofconditions, such as the timing of policy and the sense of urgency, the inherent properties of the policy,the level of value consensus in the ‘emulator country’, and the institutional compatibility between‘example’ and ‘emulator’ (Bennett, 1991, p. 223). To this may be added the sheer awareness of the exis-tence of a potential example abroad. The latter two conditions – institutional compatibility and aware-ness of the foreign example – suggest a certain preference to learn from (physically, politically)‘neighbouring’ countries. Alongside other bilateral and multilateral channels, the EU framework may be relevant in this respect, not least in view of its high density of expert contacts (Christiansen andKirchner, 2000), which may be expected to facilitate the development of common views and a commonlanguage between the member states.

Harmonization is very much the core business of the EU. It is undoubtedly the most important mech-anism used by the EU to secure national change and, probably, convergence. However, Directives inprinciple specify the ends to be achieved, but not the means of doing so. For this reason, harmoniza-tion will most directly affect the content of national policy. At the same time, the harmonization of policycontent may have important ramifications for structure and style too. New instruments may requireinstitutional adaptations or, for example in the case of voluntary agreements, imply a different (i.e. moreco-operative) policy style.

Imposition, finally, may be less important in the context of the EU. We have argued elsewhere (Jordanand Liefferink, 2004) that qualified majority voting, which now dominates EU environmental policy andopens up the possibility of adopting policies against the will of an individual member state, implies anelement of imposition. Quite apart from the simple fact that very few formal votes are ever taken in theCouncil of Ministers, one should not forget that as an essential part of the EU treaties the voting pro-cedures themselves have been unanimously endorsed by all the member states. Thus, EU policies shouldrather be seen as harmonization across the board. However, the category of ‘imposition’ may nonethe-less still pertain to the new (2004–) member states who have to adopt the entire acquis communautairewithout having participated in its formulation.2

All in all, the theoretical exercise of applying Bennett’s mechanisms to the EU conveys a picture ofpolicy content being more susceptible to convergence under the influence of the EU than structure andstyle. As we have seen, this is in general agreement with the findings of the Europeanization literature,which considers the same phenomenon from the other, i.e. domestic, perspective. We will now examinethe extent to which these a priori expectations are confirmed by our empirical findings (Jordan and Liefferink, 2004).

2 We acknowledge Helge Jörgens for drawing our attention to this important point.



Europeanization and the Convergence of National Environmental Policies

In this section, we will draw together the main findings of a set of detailed studies analysing the impactof the EU in 10 countries against other possible influences on national environmental policy (Jordanand Liefferink, 2004). We will use these data to assess to what extent, and by which mechanisms, Euro-peanization has actually led to convergence between the member states. The 10 countries that werecovered are Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway,3 Spain, Sweden andthe UK. This selection constitutes a broadly representative sample of ‘new’ (i.e. post-1995) and oldermember states, environmental ‘leaders’ and ‘laggards’ and northern and southern states.4

Patterns of Europeanization

The effect on the content of national policy to be ‘measured’ most easily is the introduction of new andthe adaptation of existing environmental standards. This effect extends to all member states. In manycases it has led to the convergence of requirements relating to, first, tradable products such as cars orlawn mowers, and, second, production processes, ranging from industrial emission limits to recyclingtargets for packaging waste. Standards that address environmental quality and nature conservation in amore general sense, e.g. the quality of bathing water or the protection of species, form a third category.

Another aspect of policy content is the choice of environmental policy instruments. It is safe to say thatin almost every member state the composition of the environmental ‘tool box’ has been affected by theEU, but by no means in precisely the same way. One group of countries, including the UK, France andFinland, had traditionally relied much on environmental quality objectives (EQOs), sometimes com-bined with a high level of discretion for local implementing agencies. These states were gradually forcedto accommodate the instrument of fixed emission limits, dominant in the EU particularly in the 1980s.Parallel to this, however, the EU continued to issue environmental quality standards in the fields of bothair and water, as part of a process dating back to the early 1970s. They required adaptation of domesticarrangements in another group of countries where emission standards had so far been paramount,notably Germany, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands. Roughly the same group of member states wasalso affected by the wave of ‘new’ environmental policy instruments that rapidly gained importance inthe 1990s (see the relevant articles in Jordan et al., 2003). Crucially, ‘new’ instruments such as EIA,access to environmental information and environmental management are all mainly procedural innature and thus misfitted with the predominantly source-based and technology-orientated approachesfollowed in Germany, Austria and Sweden. The overall effect of the EU in relation to policy instrumentscan thus, perhaps, be referred to as convergence, but only in the sense that a fuller range of types isnow applied in all member states. The EU has not forced all its member states to adopt a particularcommon repertoire of instruments (Jordan et al., 2003).

By contrast, it is considerably more difficult to assess the impact of the EU on the underlying goalsand principles of environmental policy. This is where the content and the (empirically much more elusive)style of policy meet. Ideas such as prevention, the precautionary principle or sustainable development,moreover, tend to emerge in various national and international contexts more or less simultaneously.Their precise ‘marching route’ through the institutions is very hard to track. Ever since the Third Environmental Action Programme of 1983, the EU has probably played a role in the promotion of a preventative approach. The ambition to prevent pollution at source, rather than to mitigate its after-

3 Norway is not formally a member state, but it is closely associated with the EU through the European Economic Area (EEA).4 For further details about the country studies, please refer to the acknowledgements below.


effects, was reflected in many environmental directives of the 1980s and 1990s, notably those settinglimits to various emissions to air and water, and those seeking to integrate environmental considera-tions into administrative procedures (e.g. through Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) or access toenvironmental information). At the same time, it must be conceded that an observable shift towards amore pro-active style of environmental policy making has in practice been limited largely to the envi-ronmental ‘leader’ states such as Germany, the Netherlands and the Nordic countries (Andersen andLiefferink, 1997) – and even there scarcely beyond the printed pages of environmental policy pro-grammes. The fact that this group includes Sweden and Finland, which joined the EU only in the mid-1990s, suggests that the diffusion of a ‘discourse of prevention’ can hardly be related solely to theinfluence of the EU.

Also in relation to style, using the typology by Richardson et al. (1982), the country studies indicate asmall but interesting shift in some of the most consensual member states, including Austria, Swedenand Finland, towards a slightly more adversarial style. Although ‘autonomous’ trends (such as thegrowing influence of neo-liberal ideas, deregulation and the erosion of traditional corporatist models)are strongly implicated in this shift, so too are the tight deadlines imposed by the EU political process.Put simply, they do not leave room for the extensive and repeated coordination of national negotiatingpositions in Brussels (Jordan and Liefferink, 2004).

As regards policy structure, the findings of the country studies can be summarized as follows. First,we can observe a strengthening of the position of national environment ministries. In Spain, EU acces-sion and the need to have ministerial representation in Brussels was one of the primary reasons forsetting up a separate Environment Ministry in the first place. In other countries, for instance the UK(Jordan, 2002), the task of negotiating and implementing EU policies has demonstrably contributed tothe size as well as the power of the national environment ministries vis-à-vis cognate departments. Inthe Netherlands, the technical character of many environmental issues has allowed the EnvironmentMinistry to be one of the first sector ministries to escape from the traditional dominance of the Depart-ment of Foreign Affairs in dealing with EU matters (Van den Bos, 1991). In Sweden, EU membershipled to a significant strengthening of technical agencies in the environmental field. A weakening of theinfluence on environmental policy of national parliaments has been a second effect of Europeanizationin almost all member states (see also Maurer and Wessels, 2001). Third, a certain degree of centraliza-tion of environmental policy competences took place in some, but not all, member states. Centraliza-tion is observable in Germany (a federal state) and the UK (a unitary state with a strong tradition of localdiscretion), where central agencies increasingly assumed control over EU policy making in general andits implementation in particular at the expense of sub-national levels. Interestingly, a comparable effectdid not occur in other federal or strongly decentralized states, such as Austria, Spain or Sweden (seebelow). Finally, there has been a general strengthening of the position of non-governmental organiza-tions (NGOs), who now widely use EU procedures (e.g. the formal infringement system governing casesof non-compliance) as a crowbar to influence domestic policies (e.g. Lowe and Ward, 1998).

Mechanisms and Possible Causes

Turning now to mechanisms, the convergence of environmental standards and the partial convergenceof environmental policy instruments should be interpreted as clear cases of harmonization. In mostcases, standards and instruments impinge on conditions of trade and competition. Efforts to harmonizethem are thus directly related to the EU’s central goal of creating a single European market. By theirbinding and often detailed character, directives and regulations have often pushed the content of nationalpolicies in similar directions in their specific operational fields. In addition to this, indirect effects onstructure and style can also be detected. In some cases, the establishment of new institutions (or the




adaptation of existing ones) was required in all but name by some EU legislation, e.g. the obligation toorganize water policies around water catchment areas embodied in the Water Framework Directive(2000/60/EC). In other cases, the application of new policy instruments has led to new procedures andnew working routines (e.g. access to information in Germany; cf. Knill, 2001, pp. 141–143) or creatednew political opportunities for pressure groups to exploit (e.g. environmental impact assessment inIreland and Finland; see also Jordan et al., 2003).

Due to the wide range and large number of EU environmental measures, and in spite of frequentinstances of poor implementation ‘on the ground’, the effect of harmonization in the EU is certainlyimpressive – and larger than any other international regime has so far accomplished. At the same time,this ‘top down’ effect has not prevented individual states from innovating with non-legislative instru-ments such as voluntary agreements and market based instruments, as the EU’s competence in theseareas is either weak or still poorly defined (Mol et al., 2000; Jordan et al., 2003).

With its frequent and close interaction between policy makers at various levels, the EU is, in princi-ple, well equipped to facilitate processes of learning and imitation, i.e. diffusion. The successive Envi-ronmental Action Programmes, for instance, have promoted a preventative approach to environmentalpolicy, increasingly inspired by ideas of ecological modernization (Weale, 1993). However, as far as theEU has been instrumental in preparing the ground for these ideas in some member states, this impactappears to be limited. Moreover, empirically, it is inextricably mixed up with domestic factors and theeffect of learning from geographically or politically ‘neighbouring’ countries directly or in the context ofother international organizations, such as the UN (e.g. the Brundtland report) or the OECD, etc. Theabove suggests that the sociological institutionalist idea that cultural norms diffuse transnationally is byno means obvious. At the same time, we would not exclude the possibility that imitation and learningmay play a role in the context of the EU at a more specific level, for instance with regard to the detailedimplementation of certain directives (Zito, 2000), but this goes well beyond the scope of this paper.

The remaining instances of (full or partial) convergence described above are those related to policystructure and the consensual–adversarial dimension of policy style. As a common feature, they do notdeal with member state responses to specific EU policies, but rather with the way policies are made inBrussels. Key factors here include the sectorized mode of working in the EU, combined with the tech-nical character of many environmental issues (effectively outplaying cognate government departmentsas well as parliaments); the sheer number of proposals under discussion; the tight timetabling of theEU policy process (which make it difficult for actors outside a well informed and well resourced ‘incrowd’ to become deeply and consistently engaged) and the relatively low bureaucratic levels at whichimportant decisions are often taken (which add to the low ‘visibility’ of the issues in question). The influ-ence of national parliaments, in particular, has been further reduced by the fact that EU directives areoften implemented in ways that require little or no democratic scrutiny (e.g. ministerial decrees). Giventhat a considerable share of all new environmental legislation, even in the environmental ‘leader’ states,originates from the EU, this constitutes a significant per saldo diminution in the influence of nationalparliaments.

This type of EU impact should probably be considered as the outcome of learning processes, in thegeneral sense of (gradual) adaptation to changing circumstances.5 At the same time, however, there isa considerable element of pressure involved, since the member states do not really seem to have an alter-

5 We acknowledge Helge Jörgens for making a number of valuable remarks about this point. At first sight, the effects considered here mayremind one of the case of a country being outvoted in the Council of Ministers and thus ‘forced’ to implement a policy against its own will –a situation interpreted as harmonization above. There is a crucial difference, however. In the latter case, the policy in question is itself theobject of ‘deliberate and cooperative’ harmonization according to commonly agreed rules. Effects like the disempowerment of national parlia-ments or the strengthening of environmental ministries, in contrast, have never been the goal of any deliberate effort. Listing them as ‘har-monization’, therefore, would, in our view, be odd.


native. So is this imposition, or not? Imposition was defined above as ‘one country being intentionallyforced to adopt the policies favored by another country, by an international organization or by a privateactor’ (cf. Jörgens, 2003, p. 6). Speaking strictly, this is not what we see here. It is clearly not the sys-tematic intention of an EU member or an EU institution, or indeed any other actor in particular, to dis-empower, for instance, the parliament in a fellow member state. In fact, none of these actors has thepower to do so. What is at stake here is rather the unintended (and often undesired!) consequences ofthe procedures surrounding harmonization. Member states are, as it were, caught in a procedural trap.As member states are hardly able to back out from it, the process represents a very much ‘forced’ or‘imposed’ form of learning.

In most of the instances quoted above, this process of ‘imposed learning’ as regards procedures hasled to considerable convergence (e.g. strengthening of national environment ministries, empowermentof NGOs, disempowerment of national parliaments), or at least to some convergence (e.g. the shift to aslightly more adversarial style in some highly consensual countries).

As regards a possible centralizing effect of EU environmental policy, however, the pattern was moredifficult to decipher. In theory, a certain degree of centralization might reasonably be expected. First,national departments negotiate in Brussels; they are the gatekeepers of the politics of multi-level envi-ronmental governance. Even in the most federal states, the formal position of sub-national levels innational EU coordination is usually marginal, whereas the institutional mechanisms to facilitate sub-national involvement in Brussels, such as the Committee of the Regions, are still not sufficiently devel-oped to guarantee them a consistent input. Some of the factors listed above (e.g. the high level oftechnical expertise required, complicated and partly ‘invisible’ procedures, tight schedules) further helpto make it difficult for sub-national actors to play a more proactive role in EU environmental policymaking. Second, national departments are responsible for the implementation of EU legislation. Fur-thermore, the often highly detailed rules produced in Brussels can set considerable limits upon tradi-tional discretion in the setting and enforcement of standards by regional or local authorities.

From this point of view, the intriguing question is not why the expected centralizing effect manifesteditself in countries like Germany and the UK, but rather why it did not come to the fore more clearly inother federal or comparably decentralized states, such as Austria, Spain or Sweden. The reason is prob-ably that in the latter countries, compared with other policy fields, environmental policy had been rela-tively centralized from the outset. In Sweden (Kronsell, 1997) and particularly Spain (Boerzel, 2002),moreover, the domestic trend in the 1980s and 1990s was one of decentralization rather than central-ization of environmental competences. The effect of Europeanization with regard to centralization, then,has been to wash away some peculiarities in some countries, without creating outright convergence.Overall, however, domestic traditions and trends in this respect appear to have persisted vis-à-vis the EU.

Conclusions: Assessing the EU’s Role in Policy Convergence

An important conclusion to be drawn from our analysis is that Europeanization cannot be equated witha fast, smooth or self-perpetuating process of convergence in Europe. With regard to some aspects oftheir internal make-up, member states have undoubtedly become more similar under the influence ofthe EU. Convergence is most strongly apparent with regard to the setting (or ‘calibration’) of individualenvironmental standards. This is hardly surprising in view of the EU’s ability to issue binding legisla-tion in this field. Second, some structural developments were shared by several member states, notablyregarding the roles of national environmental ministries, national parliaments and NGOs. All of thesecould be reasonably cited as instances of learning ‘imposed’ upon the member states by the workingprocedures of the EU, even if other, extraneous factors may also have played a role. These developments



add up to a noticeable change in the structure of national policy that goes further than might be expectedfrom a very conservative reading of historical institutional theory.

At the same time however, these relatively isolated phenomena do not justify the claim that EUmember states are converging towards one ‘European’ model. Even if national parliaments have gen-erally lost powers to the bureaucracy, and even if environment ministries have generally consolidatedtheir positions vis-à-vis other departments, this has taken place in the context of national decision-makingprocedures, coordination mechanisms and political traditions, which have remained essentially the samein spite of EU membership. Similarly, the EU has interfered with consultation mechanisms in somemember states, without fundamentally changing their mainly consensual policy style, and the EU hasbroadened the range of environmental policy instruments in several countries, without seriously chal-lenging their traditional national ‘repertoires’ of instruments (Jordan et al., 2003).

In this context, it is interesting to refer to the study by Kassim et al. (2000, 2001) on the co-ordina-tion mechanisms set up by the member states to ensure a coherent and effective input into EU politics.If there is one aspect of the member states’ institutional structures that is the most likely to converge,it is these. After all, they are all directed towards influencing the same thing: the process and outcomesof ‘Brussels’. As Kassim et al. have shown in quite some detail, however, the new committees, networksand procedures basically follow pre-existing national patterns of coordination among national actors.This even goes for what is potentially the most Europeanized aspect of national EU coordination: thePermanent Representations in Brussels (Kassim et al., 2001). On balance, our findings, as well as thoseby Kassim et al. and various others (e.g. Rometsch and Wessels, 1996; Bulmer and Burch, 2000; Cowleset al., 2001), strongly support the central claim of mainstream historical institutionalism of a slow andpath-dependent adaptation of national policy structures and styles to EU pressures, with relatively littlesecular convergence.

The EU has, in short, woven a couple of blue and yellow threads through the traditional fabrics ofnational environmental policies (in the present study standards; positions of ministries, parliaments andNGOs), and ironed out some of the more obvious folds that had been created since the 1960s, whenmodern environmental policies began to form (e.g. the exclusive preference for certain types of instru-ment; the extensive involvement of private and sub-national actors etc.). However, it has not managedto change their fundamental composition and design.

With the next enlargement eastwards, the level of diversity in the EU will surely increase still further.If convergence mechanisms continue to operate in the way that we have described them, the newmember states will not be forced into a European strait-jacket. No doubt they will continue to be Euro-peanized to some extent, just like the existing member states, but at the same time they will add newsolutions, instruments and approaches to the broad spectrum already available to the EU. Some of thesenational practices will almost inevitably eventually spread over the entire EU and trickle down to thenational policies of other member states. Member states in the EU operate, as it were, in one peer group.Partly by their own choice and partly pushed by European legislation, but without denying their nationaltraditions and preferences, they all increasingly draw upon a common stock of ideas, policies and institutional arrangements. What results is not convergence towards a single model, but perhaps ‘convergence in breadth’.

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on findings of a three day workshop held in Cambridge (UK) in the summer of2001. We would like to thank the European Science Foundation, the UK Economic Research Council(R000237870) and the University of Nijmegen for kindly providing joint funding. We are very grateful



to Helge Jörgens for his highly perceptive comments on an earlier version of this paper, and to theauthors of the country studies: Volkmar Lauber, Brendan Flynn, Rauno Sairinen and Arto Lindholm,Henry Buller, Rüdiger Wurzel, Mariëlle van der Zouwen, Eivind Hovden, Susana Aguilar Fernándezand Annica Kronsell. We remain fully responsible for the comparative analysis contained in this paper.The country studies as well as a more extensive comparative analysis are published in the book by Jordanand Liefferink (2004).

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Biography

Dr. Duncan Liefferink is Senior Researcher in the Department of Environmental Policy Sciences,Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9108, NL-6500 HK Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Tel.: +31 24 3612097/3611924E-mail: [email protected]

Dr. Andrew Jordan is Philip Leverhulme Prize Fellow at the School of Environmental Sciences, Uni-versity of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, UK.

Tel.: +44 1603 592552/593176E-mail: [email protected]


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