ABSTRACT
Environmental policy is an area of growing concern in the 1990s in Greece as shown by both the number of new regulations and increasing societal concern. Formerly (until the mid 1980s) part of spatial and urban planning policy and legislation, environmental policy in Greece owes its legal and institutional emancipation from planning procedures mainly to the development of a Community environmental policy. The need to implement and enforce Community environmental legislation played a particularly important role both in formulating the Greek government's environmental policy and procedure and in accelerating domestic institutional and legal changes (Spanou, 1995; Giannakourou, 1996).
