The making of EU environmental policy has clearly changed over the 40 to 50 years of its existence. This panel aims firstly to track this change as what needs to be explained: its dependent variable. Secondly, the panel will focus upon how this change can be exchanged through the proposal of independent variables. Linkages to, and discussioins of, major theories of European integratioin will of course be revisited. But scope will also be left for drawing upon other robust social science theories.

The European Union (EU) has a long history of biodiversity policy aimed at protecting and restoring the natural heritage of its member states. This paper will elaborate on the most important policy developments since the introduction of the Bern Convention and the Birds Directives in 1979 and the reflections on these developments in the scientific literature. Main topics that will be addressed are the role of biodiversity policy in the processes of Europeanization, policy implementation and the fit and misfit between EU and national policies and practices, the growing attention for stakeholder involvement, the importance of policy integration, policy failure, backlash and opposition, and the changing biodiversity ambitions reflected in the Biodiversity Strategy and the Nature Restoration Law.

Important episodes that will be discussed are the introduction of the Birds and Habitats Directives, the Fitness check of the these directive, the EU Biodiversity Strategy and EU Green Deal and recent development concerning the Nature Restoration Law.

The paper will reflect on the benefits that EU biodiversity has brought as well as the main challenges. It will partly drawn on the main conclusions from the Fitness Check that has shown that the EU Birds and Habitats Directives are fit for purpose, but that implementation needs to be improved. It will also take into account more recent developments including various attempts to alter policies and weaken ambitions.

Since almost three decades the policy makers on global and regional levels are prioritizing and introducing the policy instruments effecting waste management in different ways. In line with the EU Waste Framework Directive (WFD 2008/98/EC) environmentally sustainable growth or the green growth is seemed to be a high priority of the national and local governments across the Europe. In the most countries the local governments are responsible for the waste management, which is an issue of bottom-up policy approaches and practices. The findings confirms that there are marked differences among the EU-28 members states regarding their performance in municipal policy waste management practices. Policy analysis distinguishes four types of country clusters or regimes in respect to the waste management. The first distinction is between individualised and collective waste management systems that is represented by different levels governing practices. The second distinction is between waste preventive and treatment-oriented policies that on local level can be more flexible allowing diverse individual initiatives or more centralised/ controlled by the national or regional policy governance structures.

Learning can be an important factor in facilitating effective environmental policy outcomes when actors reflect on new knowledge, previous experiences, and may even change their perspectives and underlying beliefs as a result of this reflection. This paper examines who learns in European environmental policy, and who facilitates the learning of other actors. Learning can occur at any stage of the policy-making process and drawing lessons from past experiences means that it tends to occur over a longer time frame, usually throughout a policymaking process and emerging later policy reform processes. Actors who reflected on earlier experiences and knowledge, or even subsequently changed their beliefs, are in the ideal position to act as ‘teachers’ through sharing their lessons learned from the European level, but also the national and sub-national governance levels. This can facilitate policy-making processes, avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ and repeating past errors. To effectively influence the policy process as teachers, actors tend to use policy entrepreneurial strategies. Drawing on European climate policy as case study, this paper offers insights into who learns and who teaches in European environmental policy.

If the European Union (EU) is a global environmental superpower, then policy tools are the source of its strength. Indeed, the EU has been labelled a ‘regulatory state’ because of the importance of regulation and policy to securing its goals. During the 1990s, there had been a widespread expectation that the body of EU environmental legislation – the acquis – would steadily expand over time to match growing European competencies and environmental challenges. However, the 2008/09 Global Financial Crisis saw a shift in narratives around environmental protection, and scholarship began to explore additional directions of policy change. Here, we explain the development and nuances of each direction of policy change, namely expansion, stasis, dismantling, and termination, and map these directions against the EU’s environmental policy trajectories since the 1990s. In particular, we analyse policy dismantling, which has been a focal area of EU environmental politics research since the early 2010s. We examine the dominant conceptualisations of policy dismantling, which emphasise the ‘visibility’ and ‘deliberateness’ of dismantling, and we reflect upon the challenges faced by scholars in demonstrating such characteristics. Turning to future research, we discuss the growing possibilities of large-n policy analysis via advanced computational methods, which can identify previously hidden patterns of policy change within the vast body of EU legislation. This paper holds important implications for scholars and practitioners of EU environmental policy change who wish to understand the easily-overlooked realities of environmental protection at the European level.