Shifting Modes of European Governance? The Revival of Environmental Policy Integration in Times of Multiple Economic and Security Crises

European environmental policy faces increasing constraints and decreasing political attention due to multiple economic and security crises. The constant reactive ‘crisis-mode’ resulted in a power shift to the member states and a reduced willingness to support environmental policies. Since 2010, environmental policy-making shifted away from traditional ‘single’ purpose policies towards the integration of environmental objectives into existing sectoral policies such as greening the Common Agricultural Policy, the Indirect Land Use Change reform reducing the negative impact of crop-based biofuels in the Fuel Quality Directive and dedicating 20% of the EU 2014-2020 budget to climate change objectives. Simultaneously, reforms to the European Emission Trading Scheme remained unsuccessful. This points towards a revival of environmental policy integration (EPI) as a regulatory instrument in European policy-making and raises questions on the extent to which environmental policies are being integrated into other sectoral policies. Methodologically, the EPI literature focused on qualitative in-depth case studies. This article uses the increasing scope and capabilities of quantitative text analysis methodologies to contribute a large-N comparative evaluation of the regulatory shift from single-purpose to multi-purpose policies combining environmental objectives with sectoral priorities. There is often a mismatch between the European Commissions’ proposals and the policy outcome, whereby findings from case study research suggest that during austerity member states reduce higher environmental ambitions of the European Commission. This contribution addresses research questions on (1) ‘how does the integration of environmental objectives vary across policy areas?’ and (2) ‘who is the key driver of EPI in the EU’? The central hypotheses are that EPI varies across policy areas and that the European Commission remains the key driver, which would be indicated by more prominent mentioning of environmental keywords in the proposals published by the European Commission in comparison with the directives agreed by member states and the European Parliament.