Environmental policy integration within the EU: fresh support or tired cliché?

While incorporating climate and environmental objectives into all areas of the European Union (EU) policy has long been a legal obligation, it is increasingly recognized as an essential element of the EU’s response to the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity, and pollution. The 2019 European Green Deal represented a renewed political commitment for such environmental policy integration (EPI). At the same time, the 2024 European elections and subsequent Commission Work Programmes place substantially less emphasis on EPI and instead favor the EU’s competitiveness in an increasingly turbulent and fragmented world. Nonetheless, it remains unclear whether these changing political priorities in the ‘post European Green Deal’ era have concretely impacted how the EU integrates climate and environmental objectives in other sectors. We are thus left with an unclear picture of the state of EPI within the EU at a moment when the triple planetary crisis only continues to worsen. This paper therefore answers the research question: How has the actual implementation of EPI evolved in the EU since the European Green Deal? To answer this question, the paper first synthesizes the existing literature to develop a straightforward framework to empirically evaluate EPI within ‘non-environmental’ sectors of EU policy. It then mobilises this framework to assess EPI in policy instruments within the sectors of energy, finance, and transport – three ‘non-environmental’ sectors with strong environmental implications. Importantly, it looks at policy instruments developed during the “European Green Deal” (2019 – 2024) and the “Clean Industrial Deal” (or ‘Post European Green Deal; 2024 – present) eras to examine the link between changing political headwinds and the actual implementation of EPI in practice.