Kingston, Suzanne --- "Flexibility in EU environmental law and policy: a response to complexity, or fig leaf for expediency?" [2017] ELECD 400; in De Witte, Bruno; Ott, Andrea; Vos, Ellen (eds), "Between Flexibility and Disintegration" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 336

Book Title: Between Flexibility and Disintegration

Editor(s): De Witte, Bruno; Ott, Andrea; Vos, Ellen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781783475889

Section: Chapter 13

Section Title: Flexibility in EU environmental law and policy: a response to complexity, or fig leaf for expediency?

Author(s): Kingston, Suzanne

Number of pages: 26

Abstract/Description:

Flexibility has been embedded in the EU’s environmental law and policy from its very beginnings. Despite the urgent tone of the UN’s 1972 Stockholm Conference which influenced the Community’s first steps towards a formal policy on the environment, the above excerpt from the Commission’s proposal for the EEC’s first Environmental Action Programme shows that Brussels considered from the outset that, whatever kind of environmental policy the Community would eventually end up with, it could not be a ‘one-size-fits-all’ policy. It is no surprise, therefore, that long before the idea of ‘constitutional’ flexibility found its way into the Treaty for other areas, in the sense of enhanced cooperation and opt-out Protocols for certain Member States, we had already seen a significant level of flexibility written into the Treaty in terms of environmental protection. As discussed below, such flexibility was striking from the very first inclusion of an environmental chapter in the EEC Treaty with the Single European Act. Since then, as the scope and volume of EU environmental legislation has grown vastly (such that, on average, 80 per cent of all national environmental law is now derived from EU law), so too has the reliance on flexibility mechanisms in EU environmental policy. The environmental sphere has also been one of the EU’s first-movers in the use of ‘new governance’ techniques, moving away from traditional top-down regulation to participatory, adaptive and experimental techniques.