Joined-up government (JUG) is a major pillar of the Labour Government's Modernising Government agenda in the United Kingdom (UK). To date, however, there are still surprisingly few detailed empirical studies of how well JUG initiatives are performing. This paper takes the policy challenge of...

Sustainable development is a cross-cutting issue par excellence that necessitates a very high degree of policy coordination. This is especially true considering that the European Union's 2001 Sustainable Development Strategy demands that all European Union (EU) policies actively support the...

Based on studies of the reform of the European Union's (EU's) structural funding programmes, some scholars consider the EU to be a disordered, complex and multi-layered polity. According to such a perspective, shifting and contested power relationships in the EU, resulting in the dispersal of...

Environmental policy provides one of the oldest and most puzzling cases of policy coordination in the European Union (EU). The integration (or mainstreaming) of environmental objectives into non environmental policies such as agriculture, energy and transport, has a long history and commands...

When Britain joined the European Union in 1973, virtually all aspects of its environmental policy were determined at the national level within Britain. Thirty years on, the policy and political landscape of environmental politics has changed beyond all recognition. Over recent years, EU...

The United Kingdom is an international leader in the application of environmental policy appraisal (EPA). From the late 1980s until 2004, the UK's system sought to produce ex-ante assessments of the potential environmental impacts of different policy options. Critics maintain that it had a very...

A key question troubling the managers of the European Union (EU) is how can Europe be kept manageable? De-regulation, decentralisation and enlargement are increasing the heterogeneity of the EU and putting the present governance model under pressure. In its 2001 White Paper, the Commission...

Environmental decisions made by individuals, civil society and the state involve questions of economic efficiency, environmental effectiveness, equity and political legitimacy. These four criteria are constitutive of economic, social and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, which...

Abstract Governance is a concept in good currency, but it is often used very imprecisely. In particular, there are precious few detailed empirical analyses of the precise extent to which environmental governance has eclipsed environmental government. This paper explores the governance transition...

After a long period in the doldrums, federal approaches to understanding the EU have recently undergone a renaissance. However, some of their core claims remain somewhat ambiguous and many have still not been sufficiently tested empirically. This paper identifies several claims, namely that...