2025/06/12 by Andrew Woodhouse · 1 voice · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Economic policy #Economic system #Economics #Environmental policy #European Union Policy and Governance #Law #Natural resource economics #Political economy #Political science #Politics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/indlaw/dwaf016
published in Industrial Law Journal (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2025/06/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract In its first two decades, EU environmental policy underwent a significant political-economic shift from a social democratic policy aiming to protect the environment from the economy to a neoliberal policy aiming to protect the environment through the economy. However, the existing EU law literature pays insufficient attention to questions of political economy in its discussions, and thus, its account of the first two decades of EU environmental policy is partial. First, the neoliberal shift is underplayed because the roots of EU environmental policy in social democratic Europe are underexplored, and the potential for a different economic approach to environmental policy is obscured. Second, the shift to neoliberal environmental policy is naturalised. It is presented as the common-sense response to the growing complexity of environmental problems rather than as part of a broader political reconfiguration of the relationship between the state, market forces and society. This paper critiques and develops the existing account of this era and, in so doing, opens up the possibility of alternative paths that EU environmental policy could have taken and may yet take.