Environmental Policy Dismantling in the EU: Disintegration by Stealth or Saviour of Integration?

The European Union has radically changed since the mid-2000s: the economic crisis, its enlargement to 28 member states and the failed 2009 Copenhagen Summit have all weakened the “myth of a Green Europe” (Lenschow & Sprungk, 2010), reinforcing an economic narrative instead (Manners & Murray, 2015). This raises two questions for environmental policy scholars. What next for the EU environmental acquis? What future research agenda? Drawing on a novel mixed-method study of EU environmental policy dismantling (1990-2014), this paper argues that recent EU developments (the sharp fall in environmental proposals, the contested reviews of flagship directives) are not abrupt, unforeseeable departures from decades of expansion. Instead, they build on twenty-plus years of attempts to dismantle EU environmental policies (i.e. to cut or weaken the acquis) and to shape and limit policy expansion through subsidiarity and better regulation programmes (Golub, 1996, Van den Abeele, 2014). This paper demonstrates that dismantling research has the potential to (1) re-assess how the acquis has evolved over time and (2) appraise how ‘at risk’ it is in the current austere climate. Fulfilling this potential requires clear concepts, measures and theories of environmental dismantling (Jordan et. al, 2013), as debated in a growing literature in the US and EU Member States (Layzer, 2012; Bauer et al., 2012). EU scholars are absent from these discussions, having repeatedly failed to engage with dismantling, a political dynamic which goes against long-held assumptions of the expansionist nature of both European integration and greening (Patterson, 1999). This paper addresses this gap by (1) offering a new theoretical framework tailored to EU policy dismantling and by (2) showcasing how dismantling research can bridge traditional divisions in EU studies: combining insights from the European policy and Integration literatures, and highlighting connections between implementation outcomes, limits to expansion and dismantling attempts.