Environmental policy integration through the OECD peer reviews: integrating the economy with the environment or the environment with the economy?

Impacts of OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) environmental and economic country reviews are compared in light of their capacity to enhance environmental policy integration (EPI). Employing a policy-making network perspective, genuine EPI is presumed to require complex learning -'paradigmatic change'. Impacts of reviews on four functions of EPI - agenda-setting, horizontal communication, capacity-building, and policy-learning - are analysed. Environmental Performance Reviews have greater potential to enhance EPI than the experiment in which a sustainable development section was included in a full cycle of Economic Surveys during 2001-04. Lack of political commitment and the strength of prevailing OECD discourse - dominated by mainstream economics - explain much of the failure.