Europeanization of Environmental Policy in the New Europe: Beyond Conditionality by Mats Braun

Author:Mats Braun [Braun, Mats]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, European, Political Science, World, Environmental Policy
ISBN: 9781317139157
Google: DAAGDAAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 30000444
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Norm Entrepreneurs

As discussed in Chapter 2, the presence and strength of domestic actors promoting the underlying EU norms are crucial for the second socialization road. Therefore this part is devoted to a discussion of the existence of norm entrepreneurs outside of the public administration. The activities of ENGOs in the region regarding chemical policy have so far been rather limited. As an illustration of the low level of activity of ENGOs in the field, it can be mentioned that the Regional Environmental Center Directory on Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations in Central and Eastern Europe does not list chemicals or chemical safety as a category of NGO priorities (Andonova 2010: 278). This, however, does not mean that there were no organizations involved in lobbying for a more stringent REACH regulation in the countries under study. However, such activities were primarily restricted to the forerunner countries on EU membership and often carried out by national branches of international ENGOs, primarily Greenpeace in the Czech Republic and the WWF in Poland.27 In Romania and Bulgaria, there were hardly any such activities that would directly refer to the REACH regulation for the reason that the countries were a part of the decision-making process on the regulation only to a limited degree. However, a few ENGOs in these two countries have been approaching chemical substances from a more local perspective, and also to some degree they collaborated with public officials dealing with the REACH regulation. In Bulgaria one example of this would be the ENGO Bulgaria Without Cyanides, which campaigns against the use of cyanides in gold mining. In Romania, the civil servant in charge of the work related to the REACH regulation at the Ministry of Environment and Forests had to think hard when asked about the involvement of ENGOs in the work. After some consideration she came up with the fact that actually one ENGO from the region of Constanta is involved in a group working with the targets of chemical management for 2020.28 During the field work I also asked representatives of the larger ENGOs active in Romania and Bulgaria for advice about which ENGOs would work with chemical policy in a broader sense, but with no results. Thus, in these two countries there are no specific ENGOs that would advocate the underlying EU norms in relation to EU chemical policy.29

However, as mentioned, in the Czech Republic and Poland ENGOs worked with the REACH regulation in a systematic way, and it is possible to distinguish between three different approaches of how they lobbied the issue. First, they lobbied the countries’ public administrations, second, they approached their country’s MEPs, and third, they tried to have an impact on public opinion through the use of campaigns. Due to the nature of the decision-making process, specific attention was paid to the second level – the European Parliament. REACH was adopted by co-decision procedure, and for a long time, it seemed that the plenary vote in the European Parliament after its second reading would be decisive for the possibilities of getting a more stringent version of the regulation adopted.

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