"Environmental Affairs and European Integration: Comparative Analysis of Changing National Policy Arrangements"

de Bruijn, Theo. (1999) "Environmental Affairs and European Integration: Comparative Analysis of Changing National Policy Arrangements" . In European Union Studies Association (EUSA) > Biennial Conference > 1999 (6th), June 2-5, 1999, pages 18, Pittsburgh, PA.

Abstract

The central aim of our research is to determine whether national arrangements on environmental affairs within the European Union are converging and furthermore to explain this process. The project is part of a larger research program called "National Sovereignty and International Dependency" of the University of Twente in the Netherlands. In this program the changes in the political setting of governments in Western Europe are analyzed from institutional approaches that have been developed recently in social sciences, most notably in economics, sociology and political science. The aim is to further clarify the process of change. The program comprehends analyses of four policy areas: higher education, social security, research and development, and environmental affairs. In this paper we report on first results of our research. We start with elaborating on our research model (section 2). Then we describe recent developments within European environmental policy (section 3). In sections 4 and 5 we illustrate some developments by describing the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. We end with some concluding remarks (section 6).