Examination of Witness (Questions 86 -
99)
THURSDAY 21 OCTOBER 1999
DR ANDREW
JORDAN
Chairman
86. Welcome to the Committee, Dr Jordan, and
thank you for your paper also, which we have. Can I ask you if
there is anything you would like to add to the paper you put in,
by way of any additional remarks, before we ask you some questions?
(Dr Jordan) Not really, other than to say, first,
that the paper was prepared by myself and Dr Andrea Lenschow,
who is at the University of Salzburg. And, secondly, if you would
like me to, I could also perhaps summarise some of the main findings.
87. Yes, indeed; briefly.
(Dr Jordan) I think, as you, the Committee, have discovered,
having looked at environmental policy integration initiatives
in the UK, implementing Environmental Policy Integration (EPI)
initiatives, at the national level involves trying to improve
the horizontal co-ordination of policy. In effect, it involves
extending the envelope of environmental policy to include other
sectors. Now when you look at the European Union in light of that,
things begin to become a lot more complicated. The European Union
is a multi-level structure, having not just a national level but
also a super-national level as well, and when you try to apply
EPI in those sorts of situations it is clear that you do not just
need horizontal integration, you also need an important element
of vertical integration. And particularly in the European Union,
as I think you have heard this morning, the driving force sectors
of environmental damage really are not as communitised, i.e. EU-led,
as environmental policy. So there is only so much that can actually
be done by states acting through the various formations of the
Council of Ministers. Things have to be done at home as well.
In other words, states have to green themselves as well as greening
the European Union. So what we did in our paper was to take a
closer look at what some of the leading Member States in the European
Union actually have done to green themselves. So we looked at
Germany, The Netherlands, Denmark and also, for obvious reasons,
the UK. And what we found was that EPI has been interpreted in
very different ways by different Member States. That is quite
natural, I think, and appropriate as well, given the concept of
subsidiarity. But it is also important to look at those different
approaches and perhaps to identify possible lessons that can be
learned; lessons that the EU can learn from the Member State perspectives,
and also what the Member States can learn from the Cardiff process
as well.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
Mr Shaw
88. Just to follow on from your point, before
I get to the first question I have got down here, and it really
links into what Mr Blizzard said, it is about winning the hearts
and minds of people in Member States in order for that political
pressure, and it aint gonna happen unless that moves forward,
and there is a greater pressure on the politicians to achieve
more. Mr Blizzard said that, I think, was it, two Euro elections
ago, it was the environment and what Europe could achieve, and
the environment was quite popular. I think, with this country,
there are the beginnings, people will think about taking their
bottles to the bottle-bank, and that was very easy, but it is
harder now and we have gone beyond that. So I think, in some ways,
that rests with us; you could answer that if you wished. The next
point is the Helsinki Summit. Now it has been said by the previous
two panels giving evidence that the achievements to date are not
anything to crow about, and in some ways, as you have pointed
out in your evidence, the southern states, when they take over
the Presidency, perhaps there is not the will to put the environment
at the top of the agenda, that we would hope and Finland are saying
they are going to do, and we have said we are going to do, with
some success. What do you think can be achieved at Helsinki; do
you think it is going to be just more of a step-by-step process
and we will not get to that watershed until there is that groundswell
of opinion that leads politicians, as it were; politicians have
got to link with the people, it is a two-way thing, is it not?
(Dr Jordan) Yes. Actually, when you do look at Member
States' experiences, you can actually see some states have tried
to engage the public more. If you look at our evidence, you will
see that the Dutch, in particular, have tried to do that, by developing
what they call a `social contract' with the public. So it is quite
a bottom-up approach, compared with the British approach, which
is relatively top-down. The problem with the bottom-up approach,
obviously, is that it is extremely long and complicated to develop
and to incorporate and to continue with. But if you look at our
evidence you will see that the jury is still out on whether relying
solely on a bottom-up approach really will deliver EPI. I think
the Dutch now are beginning to contemplate more sort of top-down
interventions. So, in that respect, perhaps they can learn something
from the UK. In terms of what can be achieved at Helsinki, I think
that at the moment many important Member States are looking to
have a very short and sharp IGC, and I think it will be doubtful
whether environment will pop up on the agenda. Although, if you
look at history, environment has tended to pop up in IGCs relatively
late on, pushed relatively hard by some of the greener Member
States; so there is still perhaps an opportunity. But at the moment,
I think, as you have heard already this morning, the environmental
groups really want to see whether the current arrangements, the
ones introduced at Amsterdam, will actually work before tinkering
with the machinery of legislation once again.
89. What do you think the best way of achieving
this environmental policy integration is going to be; is it how
you described top-down and bottom-up?
(Dr Jordan) You will see that all four of the Member
States we have looked at, who were generally seen as progressive
in environmental terms, are having difficulty implementing EPI.
It is an incredibly difficult concept to put into practice. They
have all followed their own different approaches, and at the moment
it is not clear really which are delivering and which are not.
We have taken some criteria developed by the European Environment
Agency and applied those. It is quite a simplistic analysis that
we have performed, but at least there you can see that some states
have scored quite highly on some of those criteria but failed
on others, for example. Interestingly, Germany, which is often
seen to have a green halo, struggles to really achieve EPI; it
is good at producing strong environmental legislation but when
it comes to co-ordinating, particularly in a vertical sense between
different levels of governance, it struggles, having a very federal
arrangement, akin, dare I say, to the European Union, although
I would not go as far as saying the European Union was yet a federal
state, but it is quasi-federal.
Mr Shaw: No devolution then.
Chairman
90. Would a move towards subsidiarity, a greater
emphasis on subsidiarity, be in conflict with the kind of structure
you would want?
(Dr Jordan) I think what our research shows is that
subsidiarity is already occurring, states are interpreting EPI
in different ways, and I think that is right. I certainly would
not advocate a harmonised approach, and I do not think heads of
state would agree with that either.
Mr Gerrard
91. Can I just go back to a comment you made
a minute or two ago; are you suggesting that you think it is possible
that there may not be much discussion at Helsinki of environmental
issues?
(Dr Jordan) Personally, I doubt there will be much
discussion, because the agenda is very much concerned with the
big questions at the moment and the repercussions of enlargement.
In some respects, if you really are interested and keen to implement
EPI then, of course, environment should be there, but it should
have been there a long time ago when the first decisions about
enlargement were being made, rather than now where the Governments
are trying to work out the actual details. The commitment has
already been made to enlargement, the political commitment, that
is, a long time ago.
92. Can I go back now to the question of indicators,
just briefly; you have mentioned this in your paper and you have
obviously heard what the other witnesses have said. If we are
going to develop indicators at the EU level, who do you think
should be doing that and who should be responsible for monitoring
and progressing?
(Dr Jordan) Ultimately, I think it has to be states,
acting through various formations of the Council of Ministers,
that have to agree the indicators. But let me make a critical
distinction between different forms of EPI. There are relatively
weak forms of EPI, where environmental factors are simply taken
into account. Anybody that has watched "Yes, Minister"
will know that "taking into account" is just a euphemism,
often, for just ignoring and continuing as usual. And then there
are stronger forms of integration, stronger forms of EPI, where
environmental issues are a basic premise of decision-making, and
decisions are altered, often fundamentally, when they contradict
sustainability requirements. At the moment, I suspect that indicators
are being interpreted very much on the weak sorts of variants
rather than the strong variant, so I think they are being contemplated
as sort of aspirational, in a very declaratory sort of way, rather
than something that really has to be achieved, something that
actually alters policies. To my mind, it is not actually clear
really whether states have really thought through, having signed
up to indicators, what the political difficulties could be further
down the road of actually altering policies.
93. But then monitoring does become quite critical,
does it not?
(Dr Jordan) Obviously, yes, it does.
94. So at what level should that be done, at
state level or EU level?
(Dr Jordan) If you look at the experience at the Member
State level, you will see that the states that have done the most
and have made the most progress are the ones where there is political
support at the very centre of government and where the centre
of government, be that federal government or the No.10 Policy
Unit, or whatever, can act as an impartial sort of referee, almost,
and can bang heads together when EPI requirements are not complied
with. And so, really, if there is going to be some form of monitoring
it has to be done centrally; it cannot be done, I do not think,
successfully by the Environment Agency, or the Environment Directorate,
or whatever. It just comes back to this issue of ownership: it
is just seen as the Environment Directorate agency's, or whoever's
problem, rather than all agencies' problem.
95. You talked about the need for a multi-level
approach and linkages between Member States' policy and EU; how
do you actually start to develop links between those various levels?
(Dr Jordan) I think you can see the difficulties already,
as I say in the paper, the difficulties which are emerging in
the area of Climate Change, where targets are set at the EU level,
and there is a huge debate then about how you actually allocate
those targets between the different Member States. So there really
does have to be some co-ordination between the targets and indicators,
or whatever, that are set at the European level and those that
are set lower down, otherwise there will be no coherence in the
system and the whole system potentially could become contradictory.
You have a sector which is behaving well at the national level
but at the EU level is acting in a rather unruly manner against
sustainability criteria.
96. You used the phrase in your paper that there
are some states that have a mountain to climb if they are going
to achieve EPI; how do you develop links between those states
and the EU level that help them to do that?
(Dr Jordan) This is the big problem. Because we actually
looked at the most progressive environmental states in the European
Union, you would expect, in a way, EPI to be progressing quite
well there, and it is. The UK, in particular, is doing quite well;
but even so there are problems. So if you then shift the spotlight
to some of the Mediterranean Member States, for example, and certainly
the aspiring Member States in the former Soviet Union, then you
can see the problems are going to be potentially huge, where the
governing systems are just not there at the moment, and where
environmental agencies are either just not there or are very,
very weak, and where the social and political demand is for growth,
good old, old-fashioned, economic growth, producing wealth, prosperity,
cars, material possessions, etc., etc.
97. How do we make institutional changes in
the EU that help to encourage those countries to develop policies
then?
(Dr Jordan) This is really what the current process
of accession is trying to grapple with at the moment, where each
state is having to talk with different parts of the Commission
and show how it is adapting, or how it will adapt, to meet the
environmental acquis. That is really where the process
has got to start, but, of course, EPI is not just a short-term
process, it is a medium- to long-term process, so really there
has got to be some capacity-building as well. And an indication
from the European Union that membership of the European Union
does not just mean complying with trade rules, etc., but also
means complying with environmental rules as well, because they
are as integral to the completion of the Single Market as other
aspects of EU regulation.
98. Can I just ask you about the institutional
changes within the EU. You said in your paper that you have got
to have some basic level of central co-ordination, there has got
to be something there centrally, otherwise things will not work;
who do you think ought to be responsible, what sort of changes
might we need, Commission, Council of Ministers, Parliament, what
sort of change?
(Dr Jordan) Again, the main lesson I think you can
draw from looking at the experience of EPI at the national level
is that there has to be high-level political support. So if you
follow that maxim and apply it to the European Union I think you
are looking at some strong central support within the Commission,
the Commission President, for example, supported by some kind
of task force or co-ordinating body. There also, I think, has
to be an environmental unit within each Directorate General. That
certainly what the Dutch are trying to do: mainstreaming environmental
ideas and concepts into each part of the bureaucracy. That covers
the Community institutions. But in terms of Member States, there
has to be strong support, continuing support, I think, from the
corresponding body, the European Council of heads of state, because,
ultimately, they are the leaders of the European Union, in a political
sense, they are the ones who will really have to keep rolling.
Mr Savidge
99. Can I just tease out your last answer there
a little bit further. You may have gathered, there was a slight
divergence between our previous witnesses, between whether it
was better to have the President given the additional status,
if you like, of the office, or whether it was better to have a
Vice-President because they could be much more proactive, perhaps.
Would you like perhaps just to enlarge on why you tended to say
the President rather than a Vice-President?
(Dr Jordan) I do not want to get stuck in the details,
but, clearly, there has to be some high-level support. If the
word on the streets is that the President, or somebody high up,
is interested in EPI, feels it is important, and, in a sense,
people's careers can be furthered by following this sort of approach,
then, yes, that is how mainstreaming advances.
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