Environmental and Agricultural Policy:What Roles for the EU and the Member States?

The assessment of the role for the EU and the member states in environmental andagricultural policy in this paper is based on the principle of subsidiarity. Applied to thequestion of centralisation versus decentralisation of policy design and implementation, thesubsidiarity principle states that responsibility should be assigned to the smallest viablecontext at which the objective can efficiently be attained.2 The economic arguments of thesubsidiarity debate build on the literature on fiscal federalism (Musgrave, 1959; Oates, 1972;Weingast, 2005) which explores the optimal level of centralisation for different publicpolicies. The general conclusion from this literature is that the most decentralised policyprocess which is able to internalise all externalities and to exploit potential economies of scaleis preferable....