European Integration and the Environment: How Green Is the EU?

The environmental policy of the European Union is a key domain for the analysis of European integration processes. However, existing studies on the subject, notably those concerned with Europeanization, stress different impacts. Not only has European environmental policy varied in its impacts across Member States, but its level of integration differs from one environmental issue to another. This special issue reexamines the scope of the EU’s environmental policy. It focuses on three themes that are crucial to debates on the greening of the EU and on the significance of policy developments, namely actor strategies, institutional factors, and the structuring of environmental issues. The papers presented here address all three themes by focusing on the French case and offer perspectives that are innovative on both conceptual and methodological grounds. Each develops an original analysis, drawing mainly on public policy studies and sociological approaches. Taken as a whole, this special issue offers alternative research strategies for the study of environmental policy in the EU.