Environmental Policy Integration
To be effective, approaches to protecting the environment need to go beyond 'end-of-pipe' regulation on pollution control or waste management - the traditional responsibility of environment ministries - to address the wider drivers and pressures in our society that give rise to environmental damage in the first place. Agriculture, transport, energy, economic development, tourism - these are some of the key sectors in which the activities of private and public actors often give rise to pollution, resource depletion, and damage to biodiversity. In this situation, strategies for environmental protection need to focus on 'greening' other policy areas - to be cross-sectoral, involving a range of government departments and policy instruments.
In the EU, the requirement to integrate the needs of the environment into other sectoral policies has been included in the Treaty since 1987. The EU's fifth environmental action programme that ran through the 1990s identified five key sectors as targets for environmental policy integration (EPI), while the current (sixth) environmental action programme takes a different, thematic approach to integration, focusing on eg the marine environment, the urban environment and soils. The so-called 'Cardiff' process, launched during the UK's Presidency of the Council in 1998, targeted the different sectoral EU Councils, requiring them to produce their own strategies for integrating the environment and sustainable development into their activities. However, the difficulties standing in the way of effective integration are as much political as technical, often requiring a lengthy period of cultural and organisational change, and placing environment ministries in a new and unfamiliar role.
For almost 20 years, IEEP has been at the forefront of work to advance EPI,
working in a number of related areas:
- identifying both problems and good practice in the institutions and procedures within the Commission and the EU Member States for advancing EPI;
- ways of greening the EU treaties to give EPI greater legitimacy;
- the use and effectiveness of integrative tools such as strategic environmental assessment and sustainability impact assessment;
- using the raising and spending of public expenditure throughout the budgetary cycle in the EU and Member States to give the environment a higher profile in taxing and spending departments; and
- the optimum use of sector-specific instruments in eg the CAP and the EU's Structural Funds.
We undertake this work for a range of clients, including the European Commission, the European Parliament, the European Environment Agency, a number of Member State environment ministries and agencies, and NGOs.
For interviews, comment and articles, please contact our policy specialists Marc Pallemaerts, Kristof Geeraerts