The Evolution of EU Environmental Governance

In this presentation Ecologic Senior Fellow Ingmar von Homeyer provided an analytical overview of EU environmental governance from the early 1970s up to the present. He argued that EU environmental governance can be described as an amalgam of four to five environmental governance regimes which have successively been layered on top of each other over the past 35 years.

The evolution of EU environmental governance started with the “environment regime” which was later followed by the “Internal Market regime”, the “integration regime”, the “sustainable development regime”, and the emerging "climate regime". These governance regimes can be distinguished in terms of their prevailing overall political priorities, legal foundations, decision-making methods, types of legitimating justification, underlying political dynamics, types of environmental objectives, and instruments. Despite certain modifications, each of the regimes can still be discerned in today’s system of EU environmental governance.