"Managing environmental policy integration at the national level: From event to issue coordination"

Schout, Adriaan. (2001) "Managing environmental policy integration at the national level: From event to issue coordination". In: UNSPECIFIED, Madison, WI. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of the organizational capacities needed for environmental policy integration(EPI). "Integration" has become an important EU policy during the 1990s and is intended to remain so in the foreseeable future. A major step was the inclusion of the new Article 6 in the Treaty (achieved during the IGC Amsterdam in 1997) which gave integration a prominent place in EU policy and which underlined the political commitment. However, a strong political commitment does not necessarily lead to impressive progress in this field. In fact, one leitmotif in the history of the EU has been the focus on policy, rather than on management. Side-stepping administrative implications is quite likely to lead to delays in implementation and to frustrations about not reaching objectives. A second leitmotif has been a reliance in the EU on incremental administrative adaptations. Incremental changes may, however, be ineffective when new directions have been chosen. Of course, the administrative side of EPI has not been completely ignored but the organizational implications and exigencies have not received systematic attention. Even though mention has been made of the "measures" needed for integration - e.g. the Commission frequently refers to measures to look at integration as early as possible - it has never been specified what these measures are, under what conditions they will work, what precisely the problems are and what additional capacities are required ... In this paper we examine the new capacities that have been created in the Netherlands and the possibly remaining administrative gaps.

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