Appropriating the environment ; how the European institutions received the novel idea of the environment and made it their own

Abstract

1\. Introduction 5 2\. Conceptual Clarifications 7 2.1 Mechanisms of Diffusion 7 2.2 How to Analyze Environmental Ideas? 8 3\. Where Did Ideas about the Environment Come from? 9 4\. Which Ideas Were Adopted? The Environmental Action Programme of 1973 12 5\. Which International Models Did the EC Draw on? 15 5.1 UNESCO - Man and the Biosphere 1968 16 5.2 US - National Environmental Policy Act 1969 18 5.3 Council of Europe - European Conservation Year 1970 19 5.4 The UN Conference on the Human Environment 1972 20 5.5 Summary: Which Ideas were Included? 21 6\. How and Why Did the EC Receive and Appropriate Environmental Ideas? 23 7\. Conclusions 26 Literature 29 ; Environmental policy has become an important area of European Union (EU) policy making, even though it had not originally been foreseen in the Treaty of Rome. Its emergence in the early 1970s can be understood as a result of a transfer of the novel policy idea of the environment to the European level. This paper thus inquires into the emergence of a European environmental policy from a diffusion of ideas perspective. Rather than focusing on multi-level policy making it seeks to trace the diffusion of environmental ideas from the level of international organizations to the European Communities (EC) in the early 1970s. It analyzes how and why these new concepts were taken up by the European Communities and adapted to the specific institutional framework of the EC. Starting with a brief introduction into the historical context, the paper first explores the origins of the notion of the environment as a political concept emerging in the context of international organizations at the time. Secondly, an analysis of the first Environmental Action Programme of 1973 will be used to show how the EC conceptualized the environment, including the definition of problems and potential remedies. Thirdly, the origins of these ideas will be traced back to international models, from the UNESCO conference "Man and the Biosphere" in 1968 onwards. In a final step, the paper tries ...