Understanding sustainability policy: governance, knowledge and the search for integration
2011
Atkinson, Rob | Klausen, Jan Erling
The EU, through the Cardiff and the Gothenburg strategies, sought to counter what was seen as fragmented and uncoordinated environmental policy development by promoting a broad and integrated approach to sustainability. This article seeks to assess two recently implemented EU directives on environmental issues in light of this aim, namely the directives on Air Quality Management and Strategic Environmental Assessment. Drawing on theoretical foundations and empirical evidence from the EU FP6 project ‘Governance for Sustainability’, this article seeks to understand how policy integration is a matter of knowledge use, which is again related to the governance arrangements in which implementation takes place. Drawing on a total of 15 case studies in nine countries, the article finds that actual decision-making practice varies a lot albeit based on the same directives. In many cases, the directives were viewed as a sectoral ‘environmental tools’, and these cases were often dominated by expert knowledge being funnelled through relatively closed, hierarchical governance arrangements. In other cases, however, the directives were viewed as opportunities for politicians to cultivate a network mode of governance that ‘aspired’ to arguing and sometimes opened up for competing knowledge claims.
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