ABSTRACT
Sustainable development is now a fundamental goal of the European Union (EU). In its 2001 Sustainable Development Strategy the EU formally recognized that sustainable development includes the simultaneous pursuit of social, environmental and economic objectives within the Union. In addition, it stated that all EU policies ‘must actively support efforts by other countries – particularly those in the developing world – to achieve development that is more sustainable’ (CEC 2001a: 9). The EU has a positive (but not entirely unblemished) track record of attempting to address internal environmental issues such as pollution and biodiversity loss, as well as problems such as climate change and ozone depletion that have truly global consequences (Coffey and Baldock 2003; Jordan 2005). However, this is not enough: the EU must also take into account the effect of its internal policies (e.g. the Common Agricultural Policy) on the ability of other countries to develop more sustainably, especially those in the developing world. After all, if sustainable development within the EU involves ‘exporting’ problems to other areas then, by definition, it is not genuinely sustainable in an intra-or inter-generational sense. This was accepted by the then EU Environment Commissioner, Margot Wallstrom in 2003, when she warned that ‘our credibility will suffer if unsustainable trends [in the EU] persist, or if our policies have detrimental impacts outside the EU, in particular on the development opportunities of the poorest countries’ (Wallstrom 2003). The EU’s determination to respond to this challenge was reaffirmed in the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation and in its own ‘external Sustainable Development Strategy’ (CEC 2002a) and related documents such as the report on The World Summit on Sustainable Development one year on: implementing our commitments (CEC 2003a).
