ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews how the guiding concepts of EU environmental policy making and related governance practices have evolved through time. It starts with the EU’s commitment to sustainable development prior to 2010 and then analyses the subsequent mutation of that concept into the thematically focused concepts of climate policy integration, circular economy and bioeconomy. However, sustainable development never entirely disappeared from the lexicon of EU environmental policy, largely because of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the UN in 2015. These kept it alive in a rhetorical form, but largely failed to shape and guide EU policy making in the manner originally hoped. It then reveals how the gradual refocusing of EU environmental policy making onto climate change mitigation prepared the ground for the European Green Deal. Finally, it concludes that the EU’s sustainable development rhetoric has diluted its environmental policy focus for decades, and that the decline of sustainable development was accompanied by a refocusing of the EU environmental policy agenda onto climate action, currently one of the top priorities of contemporary EU policy makers. Although sustainable development and the SDGs do not formally coordinate internal EU policies, they continue to play a role in monitoring and communicating them.
