TY - JOUR
T1 - Governing in nested institutions
T2 - Environmental policy in the european union and the case of packaging waste
AU - Gehring, Thomas
N1 - Funding Information:
However, the Community is no longer limited to market integration. Over time, several separate 'flanking policies' have evolved, among them environmental policy (Hildebrand 1992). Identified in the early 1970s as a new area of Community activity, European environmental policy has created numerous acts of environmental legislation (Rehbinder and Stewart 1985; Johnson and Corcelle 1989; Haigh 1992). From the outset, this new area of policy-making was supported by its own organizational apparatus, composed of a separate unit within the Commission that became a Directorate-General in 1981, a specific committee of the European Parliament and a council of environmental ministers. Substantively, the new policy relied on its own regularly revised programmes. Already the first programme (OJ C (73) 112) made abundantly clear that environmental policy had its own goals and was not at all to be understood as an appendix to the Community's internal market policy. Hence, from an institution primarily devoted to economic integration, an institutionally separate, substantively independent and organizationally distinct part emerged that, other things being equal, would favour a high standard of environmental protection.
PY - 1997
Y1 - 1997
N2 - The environmental policy of the European Community is nested within a broader institution devoted predominantly to market integration. It also co-exists with the domestic environmental policies of the member states. This institutional arrangement has important consequences for environmental governance in the present Union. Not only does the wide scope for domestic environmental action generate different logics of harmonization for the regulation of products and processes, it also creates an institutional preference for European product standards because this type of regulation allows a trade-off between environmental and single market concerns. This effect is demonstrated by the development of the originally purely environmentally motivated and process related directive on packaging and packaging waste adopted in 1994. During its preparation, this legislative project was supplemented with a strong product-related component that made a trade-off between policies possible and facilitated majority support in the Council.
AB - The environmental policy of the European Community is nested within a broader institution devoted predominantly to market integration. It also co-exists with the domestic environmental policies of the member states. This institutional arrangement has important consequences for environmental governance in the present Union. Not only does the wide scope for domestic environmental action generate different logics of harmonization for the regulation of products and processes, it also creates an institutional preference for European product standards because this type of regulation allows a trade-off between environmental and single market concerns. This effect is demonstrated by the development of the originally purely environmentally motivated and process related directive on packaging and packaging waste adopted in 1994. During its preparation, this legislative project was supplemented with a strong product-related component that made a trade-off between policies possible and facilitated majority support in the Council.
KW - European environmental policy
KW - Institutional framework
KW - Internal market policy
KW - Packaging waste
KW - Process standards
KW - Product standards
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=21744437872&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/13501769780000031
DO - 10.1080/13501769780000031
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:21744437872
SN - 1350-1763
VL - 4
SP - 337
EP - 354
JO - Journal of European Public Policy
JF - Journal of European Public Policy
IS - 3
ER -