ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the development and implementation of European Community environmental law and policy. Drawing on US as well as Community experience, it develops hypotheses about the incentives for and pattern of integration of environmental law in federal systems. The chapter explores the progress of Community environmental law and the institutional factors that have shaped it. It assesses the initial hypotheses in light of the European experience and offers an evaluation of the current situation of environmental law in the Community. Integration of environmental law in a federal system occurs through two basic approaches: central determination by a federal/community authority, or coordination of law and policy by member states through negotiated agreement, development of common working understandings, conscious parallelism in judge-made law, and so on. The several underlying incentives and disincentives to integration are accommodated in different ways by the various available legal mechanisms of integration. The chapter examines mechanisms of complete integration, and then discusses mechanisms of partial integration.
