European Union Environmental Policy is at a crossroads as the community seeks to meet the challenges of climate change but also the equally fraught pressures of biodiversity loss, ubiquity of chemicals and plastics and so forth. In order for the EU to protect its own population as well as the globe, strategic policy action needs to take place within and beyond EU borders. This panel takes a step back to look at the actor dimension to this effort to protect the Earth. The panel focuses on the EU as an external actor negotiating with Third party countries and global institutions and as an internal arena where a range of society actors seek to shape the EU (and global) agenda. The panel contains two papers that focus on environmental non-governmental organisations and businesses, respectively, which are seeking to use their knowledge, financial resources, membership and clientele, articulated interests and so forth to shape EU internal and external policy on the European Green Deal, Biodiversity etc. The third paper examines how these internal processes influence the EU engagement with the external world on the issues of trade and the environment, enlargement, climate change and the range of environmental issues with international implications. Each paper has been tasked with understanding the long-standing academic debates concerning their topic as well as isolating the key core analytical dynamics in their actor focus. Each author will reflect on the core policy and political challenges, and the academic analytical implications that result, that the EU and its constituent actors face going forward in terms of environmental survival, economic competitiveness, societal well-being and resilience and other interdependent yet often competing values.

The European Union’s early environmental legislation has led to the development of a Brussels-based community of environmental non-governmental (NGOs) individually aiming to advocate for the environment across a continent (Berny 2008). These ENGOs’s capacity to represent their membership over organization maintenance considerations or decision-makers’ expectations has been questioned in the wider context of the participation of civil society organisations in the EU’s governance (Kröger 2016), while their influence on policy-making has been debated among scholars from interest group studies (Dür et al. 2015).

The paper will reconsider these two questions in the light of the growing diversity of organisational forms that came to characterize collective action in the name of the environment in Brussels. Indeed, the multiplying of organisations by definition deprived of membership, such as foundations and thinks tanks and, especially recently in the field of climate change policy (Schonefeld 2013), has renewed the landscape of organisations advocating for the environment in Brussels. Despite the lack of the empirical studies in terms of ecology of population (Berkhout et al. 2017), the increasing number and diversity of organisations, in terms of topics covered, modes of action and resource mobilisation in the field may reflect new ways to adapting to the Brussels multilevel policy games. Considering this phenomenon offers an opportunity to reflect on the link between organisational forms and modes of action, the importance of coalition politics, and finally the competition for access to decision-makers.

The EU’s environmental policies not only have an impact on its member states, but also on third countries and the wider world. This paper examines the external dimension of EU environmental policies by analysing how the EU pursues environmental objectives towards third countries and international institutions. It does so by exploring four venues through which the EU conducts its external environmental policy. For each of the four venues, the paper not only discusses the theoretical concepts and developments, but also critically assesses the opportunities and limits of each venue by presenting policy-relevant examples. First, via the enlargement venue and the related ex ante conditionality dynamic, the EU spreads its environmental regulatory framework towards candidate countries. Second, the unilateral venue consists of internal policies that have an impact on third countries. That external effect can be either deliberate (such as with the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism) or unintentional (usually referred to as the ‘Brussels Effect’). Third, the EU’s external environmental policies in its bilateral relations with third countries contain sustainability clauses in trade agreements as well as follow-up dialogue mechanisms; capacity building and support provided to third countries on environmental matters; and bilateral diplomatic outreach. Fourth, at the multilateral level, the EU has presented itself as a leader in international institutions and global environmental governance. Yet, the extent to which the EU has succeeded to deliver on this ambition has evolved over time and its international leadership has become increasingly contested.

Within EU studies, “Business” is often depicted as simply being against environmental policy. Whereas this sometimes holds true, such claims are excessively sweeping and fail to grasp the variety of economic actors and activity involved, together with their linkages to the political realm. This chapter sets out to unpack the depths of corporate action on EU environmental policymaking by arguing first that firms and their interest groups need to be considered as policy actors constantly engaged in co-constructing policy through long-term social relationships with the EU’s administrations. These relations include interactions with policymakers from the Commission, but also from the European Parliament and national governments. Second, we contend that the influence of firms and their representatives on European environmental policy is generally high. However, it can only be fully assessed through research focused on specific industries. The chapter develops these claims via a review of the existing literature upon business and environmental policy in the EU, as well as findings from our own research upon the agri-food, wood and construction industries. Overall, we claim that when business representatives do have high impacts on EU environmental policy, this stems not only from their own resources, but also from the failure of their respective opponents to counter arguments framed as being ‘economic’ in nature, and therefore to be ‘necessary’. As contemporary research in political economy underlines, the economic is in fact political because it is contingent: the EU-business-environmental policy linkage could have been constructed otherwise, and it still could be.