Fairbrass, Jenny; Jordan, Andrew --- "The informal governance of EU environmental policy: the case of biodiversity protection" [2004] ELECD 28; in Christiansen, Thomas; Piattoni, Simona (eds), "Informal Governance in the European Union" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004)

Book Title: Informal Governance in the European Union

Editor(s): Christiansen, Thomas; Piattoni, Simona

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843763512

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: The informal governance of EU environmental policy: the case of biodiversity protection

Author(s): Fairbrass, Jenny; Jordan, Andrew

Number of pages: 20

Extract:

6. The informal governance of EU
environmental policy: the case of
biodiversity protection
Jenny Fairbrass and Andrew Jordan

INTRODUCTION
Approximately 50 years ago, when treaties were signed that established the
European Union (EU) none of them contained articles that were specifically
concerned with the environment. A few provisions were directed primarily
towards human health and safety at work but these hardly amounted to an
environmental policy. It was not until the signing and ratification of the 1987
Single European Act (SEA) that environmental policy achieved formal recog-
nition as part of the EU's legal framework. However, the absence of a formal
legal basis did not prevent the adoption of the first Community law on the
environment during the 1960s and the approval of the First Environmental
Action Programme in the early 1970s. Remarkably, well before the mid-
1980s, creative use of certain Articles in the 1957 Treaty of Rome (especially
Article 235) had facilitated the accretion of a substantial body of environmen-
tal policy. As a consequence, over the course of five decades, environmental
policy has become one of the EU's most dynamic, extensive and mature areas
of competence. It ranges across issues as varied as chemicals and waste
management, air and water quality, climate change, and natural resource
management. Potentially, it is one of the most fundamental and all-encom-
passing of the EU's policies, especially since the renewed efforts at environ-
mental policy integration,1 the so-called Cardiff process, following the Cardiff
summit in ...