New Institutional Arrangements for the Next Generation of Environmental Policy Instruments: Intra- and Interpolicy-Cooperation

Abstract

It is hardly surprising that the European Science Foundation chose environmental policy instruments as the topic of one if its task forces on ‘environmental policy’. All contributions to this volume testify that environmental policy lacks the confidence that it can achieve its goals with the classical environmental policy instruments. After twenty years of hard work of implementation many policymakers arrived at the conclusion that its instruments have to be supplemented by new, more efficient tools. It seems that after a swift booming phase in the late 1970s and 1980s environmental policy, in the light of its current overarching political importance, has already for some time considerably transgressed the simple frame of ordinary policing in the field of health or industrial supervision. More recently, in the search for new instruments, theory and praxis environmental policy has borrowed increasingly from fiscal and tax policy.¹ Moreover, the slowly adopted practice of environmental impact assessments had led to first attempts to build a bridge with industrial, land use and infrastructure policy.² The EIS requires the application of environmental law in the planning and realization of new projects of all governmental policies of environmental relevance. The postulate has always been included in all the relevant laws and at least since the Single European Act of Luxembourg (1987) it figured in the pertinent body of primary law of the European Community (Art. 130 R, Para. 2). In the Maastricht Treaties it received an additional normative reinforcement.³

We would like to thank Dr. Stefan Kuks and Dagmar Kollande for the translation of parts of this text from German to English as well as Enzo Matafora and Dr. Giorgio Sailer for their assistance in Chapter 4 (scenarios).