ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY
agenda, often working closely with the Commission (Burns 2005 ). The Euro-
pean Court of Justice has also contributed positively to the development of
environmental policy. Before the Single European Act its decisions developed
legal norms that established the legitimacy of environmental measures;
subsequently, it has emancipated the environment from the single market
agenda, most notably in the Danish bottle case, which ruled that the prin-
ciple of the free movement of goods can be overridden if it helps to achieve
common environmental objectives (Koppen 2005 ;Lenschow 2005 :317). Envi-
ronmental NGOs have been able to exercise some influence in Brussels, with
asmall, institutionalised lobby of core groups, such as the European Environ-
mental Bureau, FoE and WWF, who all – except Greenpeace – receive some
EU funding (Lenschow 2005 :318). The lobby concentrates its resources on the
policy formulation stage of the legislative process, lobbying the parliament
and member states and offering expert advice to policymakers, although
it also does its best to highlight the implementation failures in EU policy
(see Chapter 12 ) (McCormick 2001 :116–22). However, in recent years the
business lobby has become much better organised and effective in resisting
costly regulations (ibid.: 111–13; Pesendorfer 2006 ).
Of course, there is a litany of problems facing EU environmental policy
that qualify its impact on the environment. The momentum driving the leg-
islative onslaught has diminished noticeably since the mid-1990s (although
some important legislation has been passed, including directives addressing
theproblem of electronic waste and establishing a framework of environ-
mental liability based on the polluter pays principle). There is also some
evidence that it is increasingly hard to agree new stringent environmen-
tal regulations. For example, the REACH programme on chemicals policy
originally included some far-reaching proposals based on the precaution-
ary principle that were intended to strengthen environmental regulations
governing a wide range of chemicals. However, the Commission’s commit-
ment to the neo-liberal elements of the Council’s Lisbon agenda, namely
thedrive for greater competitiveness and a more dynamic market, encour-
aged it to accept business lobbying that many of the proposals would harm
economic competitiveness, with the result that many proposals were signifi-
cantly watered down (Pesendorfer 2006 ). The enlargement of the EU from fif-
teen to twenty-five states in 2004 almost certainly made it harder to achieve
agreement over any policy (Tsebelis and Yataganas 2002 ); the addition of sev-
eral relatively poor Central and Eastern European industrialising states may
also have strengthened the laggard camp, although it is too early to be cer-
tain (Vandeveer and Carmin 2004 : 325–6). There are major implementation
problems involving both the transposition of EU environmental legislation
into national law and the actual delivery of policies (see Chapter11). The
EU is also responsible for many environmentally degrading policies. Most
notably, the Common Agricultural Policy – by far the largest EU budget
item – has subsidised the development of intensive farming practices that
have been hugely damaging to the environment (see Chapter7). But the most