Romania: Environmental Governance — Form without Substance

Abstract

Environmental issues — together with problems related to the functioning of the judiciary and competition policy — were the third major stumbling block for the Romanian accession to the EU. Romania significantly lagged behind most of the other CEE states with regard to its democratic development (Pridham, 2007), economic restructuring (Cernat, 2006) and public administration reform (Nunberg, 1999; Noutcheva and Bechev, 2008). While those CEE candidate countries that joined the EU in 2004 had rapidly embraced Western environmental policies, Romania only started to work on its environmental governance structures when it entered accession negotiations in 1999. The EU legal harmonization process became a major opportunity for Romania to reform its environmental institutions and to implement and monitor more efficient policies. EU pre and postaccession programs also provided Romanian authorities with access to know-how and financial resources to compensate for their poor capacities. At the same time, however, EU accession also put another burden on the transition process, as it required additional resources to be assigned for adopting and adapting to EU environmental policy.