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2 - Governing the European Union: policy choices and governance dilemmas

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2011

By
Andrew Jordan ,
Dave Huitema ,
Tim Rayner  and
Harro van Asselt
Edited by
Andrew Jordan ,
Dave Huitema ,
Harro van Asselt ,
Tim Rayner  and
Frans Berkhout
Andrew Jordan
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom
Dave Huitema
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Tim Rayner
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom
Harro van Asselt
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Andrew Jordan
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Dave Huitema
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Harro van Asselt
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Tim Rayner
Affiliation:
University of East Anglia
Frans Berkhout
Affiliation:
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
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Summary

Introduction

This book seeks to understand how governors in the EU have responded to the threat of climate change. In this chapter, we first set out and explore the typical policy choices that have to be made when governors confront a major societal problem such as climate change. We then examine the EU and identify the formal and informal features of its governance system. Our argument here is that these features shed light on how the EU has made policy choices and confronted their associated governance dilemmas in the past. In order to understand how the handling of the dilemmas might be related to these features, we then turn to different theories of the EU. Although there is an abundance of EU theories, a basic distinction can be made between those that are state-centred and those that are more process-centred. State-centred theories emphasise the importance of agency: the deliberate attempts made by states to steer the EU in their preferred direction. By contrast, more process-centred theories focus on the path-dependent nature of decision making, in which each choice sets the direction for (and constrains) future choices. In the concluding section we draw together the main threads of our argument and look forward to the next chapter, which begins to describe how climate policy has evolved in the EU.

Policy choices and governance dilemmas

Chapter 1 explained that governing is a purposive activity, which involves making difficult choices between alternative options that are supported by different groups of actors who often have incommensurate values.

Type
Chapter
Information
Climate Change Policy in the European Union
Confronting the Dilemmas of Mitigation and Adaptation?
 , pp. 29 - 51
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

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