A New Turn in the EU Sustainable Development Strategy? The Changing Nature of Policy Integration

After decades of specific attention to the environmental domain, a different trend in the EU polices for sustainable development seems to arise. Instead of strengthening the application of Environmental Policy Integration (EPI) that has been considered a ‘first-order operational principle to implement and institutionalise the idea of sustainable development’ (Lenschow 2002), the EU calls for a stronger cross-sectoral policy integration based on increased coordination and complementarity of policy measures for tackling social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainability simultaneously (COM(2010)2020). Remarkably, financial and self-regulation instruments are considered to be crucial for turning new policy objectives into actual achievements on the ground. This paper analyses the aforementioned shift in the EU strategy for sustainable development illustrating how the approach to policy integration has evolved, in particular as a consequence of the EU new agenda for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. The objective is to explore the process of policy change at different levels and investigate a preliminary impact of the new EU strategy on the ground within the framework of two relatively new policy instruments promoted by the EU: the Covenant of Mayors and the Eco-Innovation Programme. Although their specific objectives and targets are different, the operational logic of both instruments has been set out so as to encourage integration between sectors, scales and actors in the long run, relying on self-regulation and networking rather than on steering and compliance. The implementation of these instruments in Italy and the UK will be compared in order to understand to what extent policy changes at EU level affect policy practices on the ground and how actors’ preferences, interests and resources influence the creation of new policies and governance architectures for policy integration in different contexts.