ABSTRACT
The EU’s role in determining the overall goals and targets of environmental policy in Western Europe is well known and widely understood (Weale et al., 2000). However, the EU’s continuing inability to select, deploy and re-calibrate the full suite of instruments has not been fully accounted for. Yet for many scholars, the way in which policy systems select, calibrate and deploy policy instruments is hugely important. For Howlett (2011: 22): ‘Instrument choice . . . is public policy making . . . and analyzing potential instrument choices . . . is policy design’ (emphasis in original). The whole issue of instrument choice in the EU, however, is far from clear-cut. Normative political arguments in favour of using a more diverse mix of instruments in the environmental sphere are well developed. In fact, they have been employed by advocates of both more and less European integration (see Holzinger et al., 2009: 50-51; Jordan et al., 2003a: 12-16). Yet instrument
The EU’s role in determining the overall goals of environmental policy is widely known and well understood. In contrast, its role in determining the choice and use of implementing instruments at the European level is not nearly as well understood. Despite much talk about the merits of ‘new’ instruments, this chapter finds that EU environmental policy is still mainly pursued via regulatory means. There have of course been circumstances in which the EU has actively explored and even adopted non-regulatory instruments, but they have only appeared very infrequently over the past 40 years. Indeed, policy makers are much more likely to ‘govern by multiple instruments’ at the national level than at EU level. Moreover, for various reasons, regulation seems likely to remain the instrument of choice at EU level for the foreseeable future.
