Trajectories of European Environmental Governance Over Time

This paper investigates whether new ideas about policy, institutional processes and policy instruments are transforming traditional EU state arrangements, or do national institutions continue to shape path dependent dynamics of how actors behave and how instruments operate. The paper uses sociological institutionalism and policy sequencing theory to isolate the core decisions that shape the environmental governance paths taken by two EU member states, Germany and the Netherlands. In order to control for the impact of the EU policy arena and the EU treaties, this paper compares the trajectory of these two states to two non-EU Commonwealth states, Australia and Canada, over the same time period. The paper asks whether the governance-related developments in each of the case countries follow any particular pattern of convergence. The paper explores the utility of a threefold governance framework that explores institutional context, political context and ideational variables to explain policy choices. It operationalised governance in terms of the key operating principles and modes of governing, policy styles and policy instruments. The paper uses a mixture of interviews (included recent field work funded by the British Academy), government documentation and secondary sources to highlight the nature of environmental policy-making across multiple levels of analysis for all four countries for the 1970-2015 period. The paper offers several original contributions. First it applies the policy sequencing approach across decades for countries inside and outside the EU, a comparison that will highlight the differences in the EU impact. Second, it takes a multi-level approach to both the drivers and the dependent variable, governance itself. Third, in reasserts the importance of understanding party politics and government formation in the direction taken in environmental public policy.