Policy integration

The EU has made a significant effort to integrate environmental objectives into the policy making activities of all policy sectors. As an approach to improving environmental problem solving, environmental policy integration (EPI) certainly has great political potential: if implemented, economically powerful sectors such as agriculture, energy and transport would automatically take steps to ‘design out’ environmental problems before they even arise. Advocates of EPI maintain that it could do even more, potentially contributing to a significant improvement in the quality of the environment. However, EPI has proven stubbornly challenging to implement in practice. A set of factors help us understand why this has generally been the case in the EU, including: the EU’s institutional and policy context; the (variable) degree of political commitment to EPI; the inability to recognise the functional interrelations among policies; and the relative strength of the narrative or discourse underpinning EPI. The 2019 European Green Deal may nevertheless represent a new political opportunity for the EU to finally realise EPI’s full potential