Analysing Institutional Strategies for Environmental Policy Integration: The Case of EU Enterprise Policy

The aspiration to integrate environmental concerns into all areas of policy has long served as a rhetorical reference point in the environmental debate. But only recently has the objective of environmental policy integration (EPI) been tackled through serious institutional reforms. Although this has led to a rise of academic interest in the issue, much conceptual work on EPI remains to be done. This paper draws on the policy studies literature on ecological modernization to develop a framework for the analysis and evaluation of institutional strategies for EPI, arguing that they can be fruitfully evaluated on the basis of four specific functions of EPI: agenda setting, horizontal communication, capacity building and policy learning. The application of the framework to the Cardiff process in EU enterprise policy shows that its impact has varied in relation to different functions of integration.