Neighbourhood Countries: Promoting Environmental Protection Close to Home

Abstract

This chapter analyses EU external environmental policy towards the neighbourhood countries. The EU places special emphasis on establishing institutions of environmental governance and developing horizontal policy instruments in this region. Countries that have chosen to engage with the EU politically, such as Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, are obliged by ways of Association Agreements to implement stepwise the EU’s environmental acquis. However, their incentives to do so are often unrelated to environmental or climate policy but concern political goals such as access to the European single market or liberalizing visa regulations with the EU. EU capacity-building efforts place an increased emphasis on the administrative potential of the neighbourhood states to implement international commitments and the inclusion of business actors in the policy process. In parallel the EU is also reaching out to domestic environmental NGOs which are becoming local translators of EU rules and can act as watchdogs overseeing the implementation of these rules.