ABSTRACT
Officially, the European Union (EU) has only fairly recently been involved in environmental policy. Up until the signing and ratification of the 1987 Single European Act, environmental issues were not a formal part of the policy agenda of the predecessor of the EU, the European Economic Community (EEC). Unofficially though, EU environmental policies were drafted from the publication of the first EEC Environmental Action Programme of 1973 (OJEC 1973) onwards. The development of EEC/EU environmental policy therefore runs largely parallel to most international environmental policy developments, at least in the Western world. This is also true for the EEC/EU’s interest in proactive and integrated approaches to the local environment that started with the ‘Green Paper on the Urban Environment’ (CEC 1990).
