Eu Enlargement And Environmental Quality

This volume focuses attention on key environmental and institutional changes associated with eastern expansion of the European Union, assessing and challenging prevailing views about the outcomes and processes of this historic development. Looking at four central themes -- capacity changes and limitations, the EU's mixed messages and conflicting priorities, non-state actor roles and developments, and the exchange of ideas and information - the volume shows that enlargement will change the EU, not just make it bigger, and that EU officials and programs are improving aspects of environmental policy in CEE countries even as they are making others less sustainable. This book was previously published as a special issue of the journal Environmental Politics.

This book offers a window into the mechanisms that drive events when countries with poor track records in environmental protection and low administrative capacity, join an organisation with ambitious environmental regulatory regimes, which include some of the highest environmental protections standards in the world. This book examines the institutional building capacity in Romania after two decades of the development of the EU's environmental policy on elaboration, transposition, implementation, monitoring and institutional building. The book examines how Romania has fared as one of the least environmentally friendly EU member states, and poses the following questions. What are the limits of Europeanisation in the area of public policies? What is the reason why, despite the overwhelming public interest in environmental issues, and widespread agreement that urgent action to protect the environment and prevent catastrophic climate change are paramount, the pace of achieving the goals is remains slow. Why do policies fail? This book brings together several case studies focusing on the evolution of environmental policies in Romania over the last twenty years, with a special focus on the post-accession period (2007 onwards). The book provides an analysis of policies, where progress is less than satisfactory, and examines why this is the case.

This second and fully revised edition brings together some of the most influential work on the theory and practice of contemporary EU environmental policy. Comprising five comprehensive parts, it includes in-depth case studies of contemporary policy issues such as climate change, genetically modified organisms and trans-Atlantic relations, as well as an assessment of how well the EU is responding to new challenges such as enlargement, environmental policy integration and sustainability. The book's aim is to look forward and ask whether the EU is prepared or even able to respond to the 'new' governance challenges posed by the perceived need to use 'new' policy instruments and processes to 'mainstream' environmental thinking in all EU policy sectors.

This book examines how the EU can be a more proactive actor in the promotion of the principles of sustainability and fairness from a legal environmental perspective. The book is one of the results of the research activity of the Jean Monnet Chair in EU Environmental Law (2017-2020) funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ programme. The European Union and Global Environmental Protection: Transforming Influence into Action begins with an introduction of the key EU competences, instruments and mechanisms, as well as the current international challenges at the EU level. It then explores case study examples from four regulated fields: climate change, biodiversity, multilateral trade, unregulated fishing, and access to justice; and four unregulated areas: mainstreaming of the Sustainable Development Goals in EU policies, and environmental justice, highlighting the extent to which the EU might align with international environmental regimes or extend its normative power. This volume will be of great relevance to students, scholars, and EU policy makers with an interest in international environmental law and policy.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Eastern Europe, grade: 1,0, University of Applied Sciences Bremen (Institute of International Relations and Political Sience), course: Governments and Politics in Lithuania, 69 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Environmental policy in Lithuania emerged after regaining independence in the beginning of the 1990s. The young democracy had to build up a completely new legal system and institutions. At the same time this policy field has already matured on the EU-level as well as in its member states. This paper focuses on the adaptation of Lithuanian environmental policy to the requirements of the EU and employs the concept of Europeanisation to explain changes. Europeanisation, as the term is used in this paper, is concerned with the consequences of European integration for the member and applicant states and politics within them. It is found that especially through the accession process it was easy to 'export' EU rules and principles - firstly, because the pressure to adopt EU legislation was high and secondly, because local elites were ready to take EU templates. After an introduction to the topic the second chapter presents an overview over EU environmental policy, whereas the third chapter focuses on Lithuanian environmental policy and the adaptations through the EU accession process. Chapter four then employs the concept of Europeanisation to explain the impact of EU environmental policy on Lithuanian domestic policy-making and its institutions.