A Departmental Perspective - Cambridge University Press

B.J.Pol.S. 33, 261–282 Copyright  2003 Cambridge University Press DOI: 10.1017/S0007123403000115 Printed in the United Kingdom

The Europeanization of National Government and Policy: A Departmental Perspective ANDREW JORDAN* Existing scholarship claims that national policy has been much more deeply and dramatically Europeanized by the European Union (EU) than the administrative structures of national government. This finding appears to confirm the explanatory power of ‘new’ institutional theories, which emphasize the resilience of institutions in the face of strong pressures promoting greater convergence among dissimilar European political systems. Of the various national government structures that could be Europeanized, departments (or ministries) are especially important because they are primarily responsible for reconciling (or ‘fitting’) the demands of EU and national policy. However, existing scholarship does not fully investigate the extent to which departments themselves are Europeanized by the EU, or the impact that such a change could have on national policy. Taking as an example the Europeanization of one policy sector (the environment) in the United Kingdom, this article reveals that the national department has undergone a much deeper and more profound cultural change than one would expect if national structures were essentially unchanged by the Europeanization of policy. This single, but critical, case implies that the next phase of Europeanization research should open up the ‘black box’ of the state and examine the co-evolution of administrative structures, policies and politics.

It is a commonly assumed that membership of the European Union (EU) has Europeanized many if not all aspects of national political life. In most policy sectors, almost all national policy is driven by, or developed in close association with, EU or international legislation. And yet existing scholarship argues that the national administrative structures of government (such as departments and the procedures they employ to make and implement policy) are essentially untouched while the national policy Europeanizes around them. On this view, the national departments (or ministries) intervene in, but remain largely unaffected by, the steady Europeanization of national policy. Bulmer and Burch have offered the most succinct summary of this thesis in their detailed study of the United Kingdom: Membership has brought new issues onto the agenda, altered the terms of the debate concerning established issues, given whole areas of policy a European dimension, required the development of new expertise on the part of officials and ministers, involved extensive and intensive negotiations with EU partners, and raised significant problems about policy presentation and party management. Yet at the level of machinery, governmental structures and procedure, the impact of Europe has been far less evident … The significant challenges of European membership have been characterised predominantly by a process of slow and steady adaptation.1 * School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich. Thanks are due to Helen Wallace, Simon Bulmer, Tanja Bo¨rzel, Rudi Wurzel, Jenny Fairbrass, John Stevens (DTLR), Albert Weale and several anonymous referees for their extensive and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Responsibility for remaining errors and omissions rests entirely with the author. The research reported in this article was generously funded by the UK ESRC (R000237870). 1 S. Bulmer and M. Burch, ‘Organising for Europe’, Public Administration, 76 (1998), 601–28, p. 624 (emphasis added).

262

JORDAN

This puzzling contrast is not, however, simply confined to the United Kingdom, because comparative studies have uncovered a very similar pattern in other countries.2 For instance, Bulmer and Burch contrast the EU’s ‘great’ impact on German and UK policies, with the ‘far less evident’ impact on their respective administrations.3 This line of argument does not, of course, imply that national structures are completely static. For instance, recent research undertaken in Britain reveals that although normally stable over long periods, departmental cultures do, on occasions, undergo fundamental and sudden changes.4 The problem is that scholars of British government do not seek systematically to differentiate between the European (i.e. Europeanization) and domestic drivers of national structural change. Consequently, their findings do not directly inform the Europeanization ‘turn’ in EU scholarship. The aim of this article is to delve much more deeply into the internal operation of departmental life in order to shed light on the puzzling inconsistency between the ‘deep’ Europeanization of policy and the supposedly ‘shallower’ and more incremental impact on national administrative structures. It does so by examining the operating cultures of individual departments that underpin and inform the ‘machinery of government’ issues studied by Bulmer, Burch and others. The analysis draws upon a detailed empirical investigation of the Europeanization (that is the process through which member states are adapting themselves to handle the demands of EU membership) of a particular policy sphere (the environment) in the United Kingdom. On the face of it, the environmental sector’s experience of Europeanization powerfully confirms the broad outlines of Bulmer and Burch’s thesis. The EU has deeply politicized British environmental politics, empowering pressure groups and opening up new opportunity structures. The EU has also transformed national policy. In Peter Hall’s term, it has altered (though not completely overturned) the fundamental paradigms underpinning UK policy, the instruments used to attain policy goals and the precise setting of those instruments.5 But the EU’s impact on the administrative structures of UK environmental policy is not immediately obvious. Prime Minister Heath’s decision to create a national Department of the Environment (DoE) in 1970 predated the United Kingdom’s entry into the EU in 1973;6 neither had it much to do with ‘environmental’ 2 D. Rometsch and W. Wessels, eds, The EU and the Member States (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); R. Harmsen, ‘The Europeanization of National Administrations’, Governance, 12 (1999), 81–113; H. Kassim, B. G. Peters and V. Wright, eds, The National Co-ordination of EU Policy: The Domestic Level (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); H. Kassim, A. Menon, B. G. Peters and V. Wright, eds, The National Co-ordination of EU Policy: The European Level (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 3 S. Bulmer and M. Burch, ‘The “Europeanization” of Central Government’, in G. Schneider and M. Aspinwall, eds, The Rules of Integration (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), pp. 73–96, at p. 75. 4 M. Smith, D. Richards and D. Marsh, ‘The Changing Role of Central Government Departments’, in R. Rhodes, ed., Transforming British Government: Volume 2 (Basingstoke, Hants: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 146–63, at p. 150; D. Richards and M. Smith, ‘How Governments Change: Windows of Opportunity and Critical Junctures in Three Departments’, Public Policy and Administration, 12 (1997), 62–79. 5 P. Hall, ‘Policy Paradigms, Social Learning and the State’, Comparative Politics, 25 (1993), 275–96. See also N. Haigh, EEC Environmental Policy and Britain (London: ENDS, 1984); P. Lowe and S. Ward, eds, British Environmental Policy and Europe (London: Routledge, 1998); A. Weale, ‘The United Kingdom’, in M. Ja¨nicke and H. Weidner, eds, National Environmental Policies (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1997); A. J. Jordan, ‘The Impact on UK Environmental Administration’, in P. Lowe and S. Ward, eds, British Environmental Policy and Europe (London: Routledge, 1998). 6 The DoE became the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) in 1997 and then the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) in 2001, but for the sake of convenience and because my perspective is mainly historical, I use the term DoE throughout this article.

The Europeanization of National Government and Policy

263

pressures.7 Since then, however, the deep Europeanization of national policy has completely transformed the DoE’s operating environment, providing it with many more regulatory responsibilities, creating political conflicts with cognate departments and forcing it to operate in completely new institutional venues such as the EU’s Council of Ministers. Yet the operating procedures it employs to co-ordinate and implement EU policy in Britain are, as Bulmer and Burch would expect, strikingly similar to those governing national policies. Other than creating a European environmental co-ordinating unit in 1990, the DoE appears to have adapted smoothly and incrementally to the Europeanization of national policy and politics. And yet at a deeper level the DoE has undergone a much more significant cultural change in its attitude to Europe. One senior official has described the 1970s and 1980s as a ‘period of distinct Euro-scepticism before that term entered the political debate’.8 However, thirty years later, the DoE was rated among the most Europeanized Whitehall departments, well versed in the ways and means of EU policy making.9 By 1991, it had (to quote a former minister) recognized that: it is vital [to] … play a leading role in the formulation of new legislation. To do this we have to be engaged. We have to be in constant dialogue with the [Commission] and other member states. We have to be constructive and proactive in our approach. We cannot be influential if all we do is barrack from the sidelines. We have had to learn to think European.10

His phrase ‘think European’ is a curious one, because it hints at something far deeper than a change in procedure or administrative structure. It originally entered popular discourse around the time of Britain’s membership of the EU. Having surveyed the way other member states managed their European affairs, Heath decided to devolve European work to line departments in the hope that they would treat EU regulation as domestic policy work, rather than some disconnected aspect of international affairs, i.e. ‘think European’ for themselves. However, the motivation for ‘thinking European’ was always much more ambitious than improving the handling of policy; it was Heath’s way of getting Whitehall to adopt a more pro-European culture by ‘uncongeal[ing] the attitudes, habits and expectations of the British’.11 In other words, it was meant not simply to amend but deeply to transform Whitehall and its relationship with Europe. There are, as outlined more fully below, a number of reasons for treating this as a critical case of Europeanization, i.e. one in which we would not expect to discover significant structural change. In fact, the process-tracing analysis presented below reveals the opposite to be true: departments are not islands, surrounded (but largely unaffected) by, an expansive sea of Europeanized policy.12 Departments are deeply implicated in the Europeanization of both policy and politics, because they are the main channel of communication between the EU and national policy spheres. In the UK environmental 7

A. Jordan, The Europeanization of British Environmental Policy (Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave, 2002). R. Sharp, ‘Responding to Europeanization’, in P. Lowe and S. Ward, eds, British Environmental Policy and Europe (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 35. 9 J. Buller and M. Smith, ‘Civil Service Attitudes Towards European Union’, in D. Baker and D. Seawright, eds, Britain For and Against Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 172–7. 10 D. Trippier, ‘Developments in Environmental Policy at the European Level’, European Environment, 1, No. 6 (1991), 7–10, p. 9 (emphasis added). 11 The Guardian, 2 June 1971. 12 A. Gray and W. Jenkins, Administrative Politics in British Government (Brighton, Sussex: Wheatsheaf Books, 1985), p. 45. 8

264

JORDAN

sector, the Europeanization of national policy has significantly altered the DoE’s attitudes and expectations, which in turn have forced it to make small alterations to its structure and internal procedures. Crucially, the political pressures that arose from the dramatic and unexpected Europeanization of national policy eventually culminated in much deeper changes to the DoE’s operating culture, as it was forced critically to evaluate its understanding of the outside world and ‘learn’ new political preferences. In short, policy, politics and structure in this sector have been deeply transformed by the EU. These findings raise a number of intriguing questions about the precise relationship between the Europeanization of policy, of politics and of national structures. For instance, what are the origins of a department’s culture and how does it affect its relationship with the EU, specifically its ability to reconcile national and EU policy? What are the integral elements of departmental culture, and what factors might conceivably cause them to change under the influence of the EU? Moreover, what are the implications of such a change for the conventional wisdom that policy is malleable while structures are resolute? Finally, what is the precise timing and sequence of Europeanization? Do changes in a department’s structure precede or do they follow the Europeanization of policy and politics? The remainder of this article proceeds as follows. Part I sets out in more detail the terms of the puzzle identified above. Part II begins by offering a number of competing explanations for the supposed resilience of national administrative structures, before explaining why one particular aspect of national structure – the department or ministry of state – is especially deserving of more detailed empirical attention. Crucially, the claim is made that the cultural ‘software’ of departments – namely their organizational cultures, values and operating assumptions – fundamentally affects the Europeanization of national structures, policies and politics. Finally, a justification is offered for treating British environmental administration (i.e. the DoE) as a critical case of Europeanization. Part III outlines a set of theoretical concepts drawn from the organizational learning literature, which illuminate how agents (i.e. in our case departments) adapt (or fail to adapt) by learning to change in their task environment. Crucially, unlike many of the more institutional theories used to understand Europeanization, this particular approach is sensitive to the co-evolution of agency (departments) and structure (namely policy).13 Part IV introduces the DoE and charts its relationship with the EU throughout the period 1970–2000. Part V re-examines these empirical findings in the light of the theories and Part VI looks forward to the next phase of Europeanization research. I. U N P A C K I N G T H E P U Z Z L E

The Europeanization of National Policies Existing scholarship suggests that national administrative structures (such as departments, parliaments14 and implementing agencies) are relatively resilient in the face of Europeanizing pressures, whereas national laws and policies have been much more deeply Europeanized.15 This pattern is apparently replicated in the environmental sector: national 13 A. P. Cortell and S. Peterson, ‘Altered States: Explaining Domestic Institutional Change’, British Journal of Political Science, 29 (1999), 177–203, p. 202. 14 D. Dimitrakopoulos, ‘Incrementalism and Path Dependence: European Integration and Institutional Change in National Parliaments’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 39 (2001), 405–22. 15 M. G. Cowles, J. Caporaso and T. Risse, eds, Transforming Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 232; J. Schwarze, ‘The Convergence of the Administrative Laws of the EU Member States’, in F. Snyder, ed., The Europeanization of Law (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000), chap. 9, at p. 176.


265

environmental policies have been deeply Europeanized;16 but there is little evidence (at least yet) of significant policy convergence.17 On the contrary, each state has developed its own nationally distinct repertoire of policy instruments and structures to address the same problems.18 Presumably, this explains why the same EU directive can have widely contrasting impacts in different countries.19 Nonetheless, UK environmental policy has been deeply transformed by the EU. The EU has made UK policy more explicit; reduced the discretion traditionally enjoyed by local officials; introduced higher standards than would otherwise have been the case; and created a more explicit and transparent policy framework.20 The Europeanization of National Structures If we turn to administrative structures, an equally large body of work dating back to the early 1970s suggests that the ‘EU-effect’ has been undramatic, incremental and mostly path dependent. Helen Wallace was the first to document empirically the resilience of national structures in the six founding member states.21 Subsequent studies of other states, have generally confirmed her findings.22 For instance, both Kloti and Dosenrode and Hanf and Soetendorp have found only very negligible impacts and limited convergence.23 Harmsen has compared French and Dutch ministries and argued persuasively that Europeanization has not really disturbed their basic structures and operating procedures.24 Page and Wouters have compared national systems of public administration and conjecture that there is ‘no reason to believe that … Europeanization necessarily brings with it any strong change in … national administrative structure[s].’25 In fact, national structures are said to be so resilient that even their most ‘Europeanized’ parts (i.e. those co-ordinating EU policy within Brussels) retain their own, distinct approaches and 16 K. Hanf and A. Jansen, eds, Governance and Environment in Western Europe (Harlow, Herts.: Longman, 1998), p. 298. 17 A. Weale, ‘Environmental Rules and Rule Making in the EU’, Journal of European Public Policy, 3 (1996), 594–611, p. 604; A. Weale et al., European Environmental Governance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 448. 18 M. Ja¨nicke and H. Weidner, eds, National Environmental Policies (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1997); Hanf and Jansen, Governance and Environment in Western Europe. 19 N. Haigh et al., EC Environmental Policy in Practice, Volumes I and II (London: Graham and Trotman, 1986); A. J. Jordan, N. Ward and H. Buller, ‘Surf, Sea, Sand and … . Sewage: The Implementation of European Bathing Water Policy in Britain and France’, Environment and Planning A, 30 (1998), 1389–408. 20 D. Osborn, ‘The Impact of EC Environmental Policies on UK Public Administration’, Environmental Policy and Administration, 2 (1992), 199–209; N. Haigh and C. Lanigan, ‘Impact of the European Union on UK Environmental Policy Making’, in T. Gray, ed., UK Environmental Policy in the 1990s (Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan, 1995); Lowe and Ward, British Environmental Policy and Europe. 21 H. Wallace, ‘The Impact of the European Communities on National Policy Making’ Government and Opposition, 6 (1971), 520–38. 22 C. Spanou, ‘European Integration in Administrative Terms’, Journal of European Public Policy, 5 (1998), 467–84; T. Bo¨rzel, ‘Institutional Adaptation to Europeanization in Germany and Spain’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 37 (1999), 573–96; Rometsch and Wessels, The EU and the Member States, p. 329; Harmsen, ‘The Europeanization of National Administrations’, pp. 81–113. 23 U. Kloti and S. Dosenrode, ‘Adaptation to European Integration’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, 54 (1995), 273–81, p. 280; K. Hanf and B. Soetendorp, eds, Adapting to European Integration (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 186–7. 24 Harmsen, ‘The Europeanization of National Administrations’, pp. 81–113. 25 E. Page and A. Wouters, ‘The Europeanization of National Bureaucracies?’ in J. Pierre, ed., Bureaucracy in the Modern State (Aldershot, Surrey: Edward Elgar, 1995), pp. 185–204, at p. 203.

266

JORDAN

procedures.26 Again, the same holds true for national environmental structures.27 Finally, the really big ‘machinery of government’ changes (such as the creation of a new department) occur mainly because of domestic political demands (inter alia for new public management).28 The Europeanization of Whitehall None of the above necessarily implies that national structures are completely unaffected by the EU, only that the impact is slow and incremental. In the United Kingdom, the impact of Europe can be traced across the length and breadth of Whitehall, but the basic ethos and procedures of cabinet government remain essentially unaffected.29 In their study (noted above), Bulmer and Burch used historical institutional (HI) theories (see below) to measure the impact of the EU on four different elements of national structure: formal institutions (for example, the creation of new committees and co-ordination units); procedures (such as rules and procedures governing spending and information sharing); advice (for example, Cabinet Office negotiating guidelines); and culture (defined quite narrowly to include inter alia the duty to inform cognate Whitehall departments).30 They detect significant but gradual change along all four dimensions, but maintain that it has been ‘more or less wholly in keeping with British traditions’.31 If we go into the departments themselves, the same pattern persists. To take one example, the structural form and functions of the DoE have changed significantly since 1973 – it surrendered its transport responsibilities in 1976 (only to regain them in 1997 and then lose them in 2001), lost over 50 per cent of its workforce during the 1970s and 1980s,32 and was comprehensively re-reformed in 2001, with most of the environmental part (i.e. the Environmental Protection Group (EPG)) merging with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) to create DEFRA (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) (see footnote 6). Rarely, if at all, has the EU been a major causal factor in any of these changes. I I. E X P L A I N I N G R E S I L I E N C E A N D C H A N G E

Existing scholarship offers three possible explanations for the apparent resilience of national structures. First, the EU mainly produces regulatory policy; it wields much less 26 H. Kassim, ‘Conclusion’, in Kassim, Peters and Wright, eds, The National Co-ordination of EU Policy: The Domestic Level. 27 H. Siedentopf and J. Ziller, eds, Making European Policies Work (London: Sage, 1988); S. Fernandez, ‘Convergence in Environmental Policy?’ Journal of Public Policy, 14 (1994), 39–56; A. Weale et al., ‘Environmental Administration in Six European States’, Public Administration, 74 (1996), 255–74; C. Demmke, Managing European Environmental Policy: The Role of the Member States in the Policy Process (Maastricht: EIPA, 1997). 28 C. Pollitt, Manipulating the Machine (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), p. 114; Kloti and Dosenrode, ‘Adaptation to European Integration’, p. 280; Hanf and Soetendorp, Adapting to European Integration, pp. 189–90; G. Jones, ‘A Revolution in Whitehall?’ West European Politics, 12 (1989), 238–61, p. 240; M. Maor and H. Stevens, ‘Measuring the Impact of New Public Management and European Integration on Recruitment and Training in the UK Civil Service’, Public Administration, 75 (1997), 531–55. 29 S. James, British Cabinet Government (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 19. 30 Bulmer and Burch, ‘Organising for Europe’, pp. 601–28. For a slightly wider interpretation, see J. Smith, ‘Cultural Aspects of Europeanization: The Case of the Scottish Office’, Public Administration, 79 (2001), 147–63. See also J. Christoph, ‘The Effects of Britons in Brussels: The EC and the Culture of Whitehall’, Governance, 6 (1993), 518–37. 31 Bulmer and Burch, ‘Organising for Europe’, p. 603. 32 C. Hood, ‘De-privileging the UK Civil Service’, in Pierre, ed., Bureaucracy in the Modern State, pp. 92–118, at p. 114.


267

power over what Lowi famously termed constituent (i.e. organization or system-changing) policy.33 Secondly, in spite of the many thousands of EU regulations and the existence of powerful supranational organizations such as the European Commission, the EU remains surprisingly state-dominated. For Fernandez, the absence of a clear ‘EU effect’ on national structures tells us more about the ‘feebleness’ of the EU than the resilience of states.34 A third explanation draws on ‘new’ institutional theories to account for the self-preserving capabilities of domestic structures. Most popular of all is the historical variant of new institutionalism, historical institutionalism (HI), which is now regularly employed to explain the ‘stickiness’ of national institutional forms. HI claims that because national structures have evolved slowly through time as institutionally appropriate responses to local problems,35 they tend to adapt slowly rather than undergo sudden, dramatic shifts in response to external pressures such as European integration.36 Unless there are sudden, exogenous shocks or crises,37 institutions will normally respond to political challenges by reproducing themselves.38 Normally, though, change is conservative, accretive and path dependent (i.e. it will only ever constitute an incremental adjustment to what has gone before). This article identifies and explores a fourth explanation for the puzzle, which is that the impacts on national administrative structures appear limited because they have not been explored empirically. Importantly, this situation has arisen because analysts – most of whom are Europeanists rather than scholars of national politics and public policy – have not communicated with those studying structural change within different states.39 Consequently, an opportunity has been missed to open up the ‘black box’ of the state to investigate the possibility of more subtle but fundamental impacts. Until now, the Europeanization ‘turn’ has concentrated upon the ‘harder’ institutional arrangements that link national executives and the EU, namely the mechanisms for co-ordinating the input of national policy to Brussels, Whitehall conventions (for example, to share information between departments), standard operating procedures (such as governing the involvement of national parliaments) and rules. The hard ‘machinery of government’ is of course important, but so too is the supporting ‘software’ of policy making, that is the dominant beliefs and taken for granted assumptions that exist within departments and inform its daily activities.40 The softer aspects of structure include individual departments’ ‘view’, ‘line’ or ‘bias’.41 In the theoretical approach outlined below, these are constitutive of an organization’s culture, namely: [the] deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members … that operate unconsciously, and define in a basic ‘taken for granted’ fashion an organisation’s view of itself and its environment. These assumptions and beliefs are learned responses to a group’s problems of survival in its external environment.42 33

T. Lowi, ‘Four Systems of Policy, Politics and Change’, Public Administration Review, 32 (1972), 298–310. Fernandez, ‘Convergence in Environmental Policy?’ p. 42. 35 Harmsen, ‘The Europeanization of National Administrations’, p. 86. 36 K. Thelen, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics’, Annual Review of Political Science, 2 (1999), 369–404; K. Thelen and S. Steinmo, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics’, in S. Steinmo et al., eds, Structuring Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 16–18. 37 On the enabling role of crises, see Cortell and Peterson, ‘Altered States’. 38 J. March and J. Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions (New York: The Free Press, 1989), pp. 53–67. 39 M. Smith, The Core Executive in Britain (Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan, 1999). 40 J. Dryzek, ‘The Informal Logic of Institutional Design’, in R. Goodin, ed., Theory of Institutional Design (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 41 Smith, The Core Executive in Britain, p. 131. 42 E. Schein, Organisational Culture and Leadership (San Francisco, Calif.: Jossey Bass, 1985), p. 6. 34

268

JORDAN

It is generally recognized that departments do have an enduring view of the world. Smith et al. argue that this view or ‘culture’ is a ‘thread of beliefs that hold the organisational elements together’.43 It is absolutely ‘central’ to what departments seek to achieve: ‘Government departments are not blank sheets on which Ministers can write their own policy desires. Through their history, institutional biases and cultures, departments have long term policy preferences.’44 In fact, the first thing new departments do is look for a culture to bind themselves together and define a mission. It is well known that the very first secretary of state for the environment, Peter Walker, tried to build a coherent departmental culture around the notion of environmental protection.45 However, in the DoE it never really took root in the ‘non-environmental’ divisions, and the constituent elements continued with their pre-existing cultures.46 Crucially, if European integration does indeed fundamentally transform national structures, Europeanization should be detectable at the ‘deep’ level of a department’s internal culture. We return to the notions of culture and of cultural change (or learning) below. First, though, it is important to explain why departments are especially deserving of further study, and then to justify the exclusive focus on the British environmental sector. Throughout the history of European integration, states have tried to shape European rules so they correspond with pre-existing national practices. By working to ensure a ‘goodness of fit’47 between the two, states seek to minimize adjustment costs, achieve first mover advantages and reduce political uncertainty. Crucially, this process inevitably produces institutional ‘misfits’ when national practices are dissonant with European requirements. Misfits are a necessary condition for Europeanization to take place. Departments are hugely important because as the primary channels of communication between the national and European levels, they are responsible for mediating the forces of integration and Europeanization. One way departments (i.e. not ‘the state’) can achieve a ‘goodness of fit’ (or avoid the converse) between the two in their sector, is to ‘domesticate’ EU policy by ‘projecting’ their influence on to the European sphere.48 In practice, this could mean ‘uploading’ national models by defining the scope of issues before they become solidified in Commission proposals. It could also involve working in EU committees to mitigate the potential impact of new legislation before it is ‘downloaded’ from the EU. Finally, when projection fails, departments will often come under intense pressure from social groups to circumvent the unforeseen or unintended consequences of uncongenial policies by engaging in partial implementation. A department’s ability to perform these tasks will obviously affect the Europeanization of national policy. In this article, though, we want to examine how these multi-level policy games affect the Europeanization of policy, as well as the departments that participate in them. Secondly, what justification is there for treating British environmental policy as a critical case of Europeanization? In theory, the DoE had an obvious institutional interest in actively facilitating EU rule making because many environmental problems transcend borders and 43

Smith et al. ‘The Changing Role of Central Government Departments’, p. 149. Smith, The Core Executive in Britain, p. 131. 45 Jordan, The Europeanization of British Environmental Policy. 46 J. Radcliffe, The Re-organisation of British Central Government (Aldershot, Hants.: Dartmouth, 1991), pp. 113–15. 47 Cowles et al., Transforming Europe, pp. 6–9. 48 H. Wallace, ‘The Domestication of Europe and the Limits to Globalisation’ (paper presented at the IPSA World Congress, Quebec, August 2000); S. Bulmer and M. Burch, ‘The Europeanization of British Central Government’, in R. Rhodes, ed., Transforming British Government, Volume 1 (Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 46–52, at p. 48. 44


269

are, in principle, highly amenable to ‘European’ solutions. It seems reasonable to expect the DoE to have fundamentally re-orientated its structure, procedures and operating culture to maximize the political opportunities created by Europeanization, not least new political leverage over cognate departments in Whitehall. But working against such a cultural change are two important contextual features of British environmental policy. First and foremost, as a nation, Britain has tended to see European integration as a ‘disagreeable necessity rather than a positive benefit’.49 According to Hugo Young, the image of Europe as ‘a place of British failure’ is lodged deep within the national psyche.50 Whitehall was not immune from this. So, although Heath implored Whitehall departments to ‘think European’, ‘neutralism towards the [EU] was sometimes the most positive of attitudes in some departments’ nearly ten years after Britain’s entry.51 Secondly, Britain has a very deeply rooted system of environmental protection, large parts of which predate (and hence potentially ‘misfit’ with) the EU’s much more recent (i.e. post 1973) policy plans.52 Moreover, unlike many other countries (such as the Netherlands, Denmark or Germany), British governments have not normally sympathized with the continental European argument that environmental protection is a positive enabler of economic growth.53 The DoE’s obvious sectoral interest in ‘thinking European’ notwithstanding, it seems reasonable to expect UK administrative structures to be especially resistant to European integration – and hence largely unaffected by Europeanization. Therefore, if we find significant structural transformations in this particular case, it strongly suggests that the puzzling contrast outlined above may not be quite as clear-cut.54 I I I. T H E O R I Z I N G C U L T U R A L C O N T I N U I T Y A N D C H A N G E I N O R G A N I Z A T I O N S

The absence of a clear ‘EU effect’ on national structures has prompted one observer to ask whether Europeanization research is really ‘much ado about not very much’.55 Mainstream HI theory certainly predicts very minimal change. However, an important but often overlooked strand of HI predicts that actors will alter their goals, identities and preferences to reflect what is institutionally appropriate in a given situation.56 On this view, departments could conceivably change their internal assumptions and philosophies as and when new, European logics of appropriate behaviour supplement and possibly supersede national logics. The ‘transformation of the state’ argument has been put most forcefully by Christiansen et al. who argue that: ‘a significant amount of evidence suggests that, as a process, European integration has a transformative impact on the European state system and its constituent units’.57 49

D. Gowland and A. Turner, Reluctant Europeans (New York: Longman, 2000), p. 5. H. Young, This Blessed Plot (Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan, 1998), p. 3. 51 V. Willis, Britons in Brussels (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1982), p. 25. 52 Haigh and Lanigan, ‘Impact of the European Union on UK Environmental Policy Making’; Lowe and Ward, British Environmental Policy and Europe. 53 For one senior civil servant’s comments, see Sharp, ‘Responding to Europeanization’, p. 55. See also Albert Weale, The New Politics of Pollution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 66–92. 54 As argued by Weale et al., European Environmental Governance, p. 451. 55 K. Goertz, ‘European Integration and National Executives’, West European Politics, 23 (2000), 211–31, p. 214. 56 Thelen and Steinmo, ‘Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics’, p. 8. 57 T. Christiansen, K-E. Jorgensen and A. Weiner, eds, ‘The Social Construction of Europe’, Special Issue of Journal of European Public Policy, 6 (1999), 527–718, p. 529 (emphasis in the original). 50

270

JORDAN

So, is the state transforming or is it resilient? Much depends on which part or parts of the state we are talking about: the ‘harder’ structures of government or the ‘softer’ goals and cultural aspects of organizational life? The early neofunctionalist argument that national officials are inexorably socialized into the shared values of the EU system is now widely discredited. There are, however, good grounds for believing that something as large and apparently rigid as a department can ‘learn’ new interests and a new cultural orientation over extended periods through its involvement in EU policy making.58 The term ‘organizational learning’ (OL) has been defined as the ‘ability to detect and correct errors and thereby improve the functioning of an organisation’.59 Argyris helpfully defines an ‘error’ as a mismatch between an organization’s intention and political outcomes.60 The literature on OL is especially well suited to the purposes of this article because it combines elements of both structure and agency. In contrast, more institutional theories say much about the constraints imposed by institutions, but little about how agents respond to them. More specifically, OL theories employ many of the same concepts used by HI (such as path dependency, political crises and ‘the stickiness of adaptation’) to explore how organisations struggle to cope with changes in their task environment. For our purposes, it helps to theorize the important choice that confronts departments when they enter the EU, namely between innovating in order to succeed in a new institutional context (for example, by uploading national models to the EU) and falling back upon well-known national routines (for example, blocking the EU and/or passively downloading policy from Brussels – Europeanization). So, how does a department actually ‘learn’? Hedberg explains that while individuals learn, OL is more than the sum of their combined efforts: ‘Organizations do not have brains but they have cognitive systems and memories … members come and go, and leadership changes, but organizations’ memories preserve certain behaviours, mental maps, norms and values over time.’61 The link between these aspects and what we have defined as a department’s culture, is obvious. Given that few organizations are designed completely afresh, important elements of an organization’s culture are often inherited from its predecessors as ‘sedimented’ or ‘congenital knowledge’.62 This inherited culture is then constantly amended in the light of ‘successful’ problem solving. Guy Peters helpfully identifies three important elements of organisational culture on to which we can map the effects of Europeanization:63 —Organizational artefacts are the material and non-material objects that demonstrate an organization’s goals and values, such as corporate mission statements, annual reports, specialist language and the harder institutional forms examined inter alia by Bulmer and Burch. These are generally fairly visible.64 58 D. Mazmanian and J. Neinaber, Can Organizations Change? (Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 1979); L. Etheridge, Can Governments Learn? (New York: Pergamon, 1985); E. Haas, When Knowledge is Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 59 J. Olsen and B. G. Peters, Learning from Experience? ARENA Reprint 96/6 (Oslo: ARENA, 1996). 60 C. Argyris, On Organizational Learning (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999), p. xiii. 61 B. Hedberg, ‘How Organizations Learn and Unlearn’, in P. Nystrom and W. Starbuck, eds, Handbook of Organization Design: Volume 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 3. 62 A. Stinchcombe, ‘Social Structure and Organization’, in J. March, ed., Handbook of Organizations (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965); G. Huber, ‘Organisational Learning’, Organisation Science, 2 (1993), 88–115, p. 91. 63 B. G. Peters, ‘Administrative Culture and Analysis of Public Organisation’, Indian Journal of Public Administration, 36 (1990), 420–8. 64 Bulmer and Burch ‘Organising for Europe’; C. Goodsell, ‘Bureaucratic Manipulation of Physical Symbols’, American Journal of Political Science, 21 (1977), 79–91.


271

—Organizational values are the ‘consciously held views about truth and reality’,65 which justify an organization’s core mission to the outside world. They may, for example, describe the characteristics of a ‘good’ policy. In a sense, they reveal the underlying ‘goals’ of an organisation.66 —Organizational assumptions are the ‘fundamental presuppositions’ held by members in relation to their organization’s function in the world, the basic nature of society and the causal relationship between its constituent parts. They have a ‘taken for granted’ quality, being so deeply ingrained that members perceive them subconsciously. As such, they are rarely debated openly, even within organizations. So, how does an organization’s culture respond to events occurring in the world outside it? Argyris and Scho¨n made one of the earliest and most widely cited attempts to relate culture to OL.67 They differentiate between two main levels of learning. Single loop learning occurs when organizational errors are detected and corrected without individuals fundamentally questioning or altering the underlying culture.68 Single loop learning is therefore learning within the existing organizational culture. Argyris and Scho¨n reserve the term double loop for learning which involves a change in the culture of an organization. However, first individuals must first feel willing and able to challenge existing approaches to solving problems. In this sense double loop learning is ‘habit defying’ because it questions what an organization is actually trying to achieve (i.e. its organizational values and assumptions).69 Why might organizations systematically fail to learn from their errors? Here scholars of OL draw heavily upon ‘new’ institutional concepts.70 HI makes three important predictions about change (and hence the capacity for OL) in organizations. The first is that most OL is very conservative and path-dependent.71 So, rather than re-inventing themselves, organizations tend to cling to what they know they are good at (‘a competency trap’) even though this has the paradoxical effect of reinforcing the very culture that created the problem in the first place (‘the stickiness of adaptation’).72 In a similar vein, Argyris and Scho¨n have argued that ‘inhibitory’ loops thwart cultural change, preventing organizations from adjusting smoothly and efficiently to changing external conditions.73 These arise when staff members react defensively to errors, thereby perpetuating them. Secondly, an organization’s congenital knowledge will shape what it searches for, and the manner in which information about errors is interpreted and utilized. Structure and agency are interdependent. Thus new members of an organization are inculcated with its cultural norms and values (structure), which in turn influences their capacity to learn (agency) about changes in the outside world. Crucially, the relationship between the two is intimate and reciprocal: organizational culture is at once a repository for past learning experiences and a ‘filter’ through which external events are perceived.74 These ‘perceptual 65

J. Ott, The Organizational Culture Perspective (Chicago: The Dorsey Press, 1989), p. 39. L. Mohr, ‘The Concept of Organizational Goal’, American Political Science Review, 67 (1973), 470–81. 67 C. Argyris and D. Scho¨n, Organizational Learning (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978). 68 Argyris, On Organizational Learning, p. 68. 69 Haas, When Knowledge is Power. 70 J. March and J. Olsen, ‘The New Institutionalism’, American Political Science Review, 78 (1984), 734–49; B. Levitt and J. March, ‘Organisational Learning’, Annual Review of Sociology, 14 (1988), 319–40. 71 J. March, L. Sproull and M. Tamuz, ‘Learning from Samples of One or Fewer’, Organisation Science, 2 (1991), 1–13. 72 Levitt and March, ‘Organisational Learning’, p. 322; March and Olsen, Rediscovering Institutions, p. 169. 73 Argyris and Scho¨n, Organizational Learning. 74 Hedberg, ‘How Organizations Learn and Unlearn’, p. 8. 66

272

JORDAN

filters’ emphasize certain aspects of an organization’s task environment and downplay others. Argyris claims that these filters may be so powerful as to prevent an organization from even recognizing the need for change.75 Moreover, if and when it decides to respond, it could be on the basis of heavily filtered (i.e. distorted) information. Sometimes, organizations are ‘lucky’ and their ‘misguided’ responses work. But this simply encourages them to cling even more tightly to the prevailing culture in the mistaken belief that it is ‘optimal’ (‘superstitious learning’).76 Finally, deeper, double loop learning (or ‘unlearning’) normally occurs in an organization only after an accumulation of severe political crises has ‘unfrozen’ its existing culture.77 I V. T H E E U R O P E A N I Z A T I O N O F U K E N V I R O N M E N T A L P O L I C Y

The DoE: A Department in Search of a Culture? In theory, the DoE should have been culturally attuned to Europe. However, it inherited an organizational culture from its predecessors that was neither ‘environmental’ nor ‘European’.78 Although Peter Walker tried unsuccessfully to build a culture around environmental issues, most of his successors concentrated on the more economic parts of the DoE’s vast empire. A former head of the EPG’s international environmental arm, the Central Unit on Environmental Pollution (CUEP), freely admits that it ‘it certainly wasn’t a department of the environment as such, and it wasn’t even a department for the environment, which a lot of people criticized it for. But it was inevitable in a way because it was a construct from three totally different ministries with very different cultures.’79 One of the problems was that following the well-established principle of localized policy making, many operational aspects of ‘environmental policy’ were devolved to technical agencies. Although it set the broad parameters of national policy, the EPG remained a backwater in the department, employing just 3.2 per cent of the DoE’s staff in 1980 (see Table 1).80 In terms of Europe, the DoE came under no immediate pressure to ‘think European’ because the scope of EU environmental activity was still fairly limited in the early 1970s. In fact, during the formative years, key figures such as Peter Walker and the then chief scientist, Martin Holdgate, devoted their time to international bodies such as the United Nations, because they were regarded as more effective channels of inter-state collaboration. Even though Heath and some secretaries of state were pro-European, more sceptical attitudes were widespread in the DoE throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The best and brightest civil servants took their cue from these and gravitated towards the more politically salient areas such as housing and local government, which even today are not that deeply Europeanized. The past also limited the DoE in other ways. For instance, it had virtually no experience of European governance to draw upon. In 1970, national policy was only very partially Europeanized and there were very few genuinely international problems. British policy makers thought they had mastered most national environmental problems and resented the 75

Argyris, On Organizational Learning. Levitt and March, ‘Organisational Learning’, pp. 325–6. 77 Hedberg, ‘How Organizations Learn and Unlearn’, p. 18; J. Olsen, Europeanization and Nation-State Dynamics, ARENA Reprint 96/3 (Oslo: ARENA, 1996), p. 253; see also Cortell and Peterson, ‘Altered States’. 78 Namely the Ministries of Public Buildings and Works, Housing and Local Government, and Transport. 79 A. Fairclough, interview with the author (London, 8 December 1999). 80 P. McQuail, ‘Mapping the Department of the Environment’ (unpublished mimeograph; London: DoE, 1994). 76

The Europeanization of National Government and Policy TABLE

1

273

The Relative Size of the DoE’s Environmental Protection Group, 1980–93

Year

Number of staff in the EPG

% of total DoE staff

1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993

333 260 265 250 248 252 288 370 418 528 522 555 804 827

3.2 2.6 3.0 3.2 3.8 3.9 4.4 5.8 6.4 8.0 10.3 10.6 17.9 18.4

Source: McQuail, Mapping the Department of the Environment, p. 52.

EU’s involvement. The organizational mechanisms for uploading national policy were, in any case, weakly integrated into the structure of the DoE. The EPG’s CUEP was supposed to be the DoE’s ‘green conscience’, but it was (at least in 1970–75) an alien body, having been parachuted in from the Cabinet Office in 1970. The EPG did not create a European co-ordinating unit (EPEUR) until 1990, by which time most national policy was already effectively Europeanized. By comparison, departments in more Europeanized policy sectors such as the DTI and MAFF had had to get up to speed much more quickly. They developed special co-ordinating divisions well before accession in 1973, to upload UK policies (such as the single market) to Brussels. By the mid-1980s, European environmental work was so downgraded that the DoE regularly sent a parliamentary under-secretary (i.e. not even a minister) to negotiate directives. Key directives were negotiated by fairly junior civil servants, with relatively little input from the DoE’s lawyers. 1970–73: The Birth of Modern Environmental Policy In 1972, Walker prepared carefully for and attended the first big UN environment conference in Stockholm, but relatively little was done for the subsequent summit in Paris that initiated EU environmental policy. In the DoE there was an organizational assumption that EU action would not amount to much. Holdgate, for example, believed the Commission was simply ‘on the sidelines, watching what was happening in the Member States’.81 Even committed Europhiles had to admit that the EU was ‘mundane’ in comparison to national policy ‘and the wheels to grind excessively small’.82 Above all, there was, as learning theories would predict, a strong faith among policy elites in British 81

M. Holdgate, ‘Environmental Policies in Britain and Mainland Europe’, in R. Macrory, ed., Britain, Europe and the Environment (London: Imperial College ICCET, 1983), p. 11. 82 Haigh, EEC Environmental Policy and Britain, p. 7.

274

JORDAN TABLE

2

National Environmental Policies ‘Uploaded’ to the EU under the Commission’s ‘Standstill Agreement’, 1973–80 Draft legislation

Administrative measures

International agreements

Others

Total

UK Germany Belgium Denmark France Ireland Italy Netherlands Luxembourg

6 28 1 1 26 2 4 6 1

0 2 3 24 6 0 0 17 0

0 2 1 4 3 0 2 0 0

0 2 0 0 6 0 0 0 0

6 34 5 29 41 2 6 23 1

Total

75

52

12

8

147

Source: Wurzel, Britain, Germany and the European Union.

policy, which had developed piecemeal over a century or more. A guide produced by the CUEP even claimed that the United Kingdom was ‘at a comparatively advanced stage of development and adoption of environmental protection policies’.83 Having already legislated, the DoE was therefore much slower to upload new policy ideas to the EU, submitting relatively few legislative proposals to the European Commission under the so-called ‘standstill agreement’ (see Table 2). That very few of the ideas it did upload ever culminated in EU legislation says a lot about the DoE’s inability to play the Brussels game. Party politics, of course, also played a part, though ministers were not so much anti-European, as personally uninterested in the environment. More importantly, though, prevailing national policies set firm limits on what the DoE could achieve in Europe. These institutional arrangements, which relied on discretionary targets and localized implementation, were ‘sticky’ in the sense that they commanded widespread respect among policy elites. Industry had invested significant amounts of time and money developing technologies (for example, long pipes and tall chimneys) to implement them, locking them into place. Moreover, in terms of learning theory, although the DoE thought these arrangements worked well in Britain, they were simply too unsystematic to serve as a general model for EU legislation. Crucially, they could not easily be uploaded to the EU.84 1973–79: Financial Restraint and Philosophical Conflict The high hopes of the DoE’s formative period did not last long and its relationship with Europe degenerated from mild apathy to deep philosophical conflict over the EU’s approach to pollution control. The negative position adopted by the DoE was partly a reflection of strong industry lobbying transmitted through the DTI (the economy was entering a deep recession). However, the pre-precaution principle view that waste should be externalized along pipes and chimneys was an integral part of the DoE’s organizational culture (with the chief scientist’s 1979 book on pollution control being an organizational 83 84

DoE, Environmental Standards in Britain: How They Work, Pollution Paper (London: HMSO, 1978), p. 1. Haigh, EEC Environmental Policy and Britain, p. 303.


275

artefact par excellence), especially in the large and very powerful water and air directorates.85 Although some British agencies did contribute positively and successfully to EU environmental policy making, the general tenor of the DoE’s contribution was insular and defensive. Caught in the competency trap of fighting for the status quo, the DoE sought refuge behind the national veto in the Environment Council. Every effort was also made to stymie Europeanization by neutering directives at the implementation stage. Things might have been slightly different if ministers had shown some interest in environmental matters. But if they had wanted to be more proactive (which they did not), the path-dependent effect of pre-existing national policy would have limited their ability to upload policy. So instead, they fell into the competency trap of trying (belatedly) to convince other EU states of the merits of ‘the British approach’.86 This ‘approach’ was never a policy paradigm in the Kuhnian sense of a narrow, confining cognitive framework, but a post hoc justification for resisting the disruptive effects of Europeanization.87 Crucially, this justification was expressed in very negative and defensive terms; very little ‘British’ legislation was proactively uploaded to the EU. 1979–88: The Europeanization of National Policy Under Margaret Thatcher’s premiership a succession of secretaries of state for the environment beginning with Michael Heseltine (1979–83) busied themselves reducing the size of the department, cutting staff numbers and streamlining the planning system. Staffing levels were cut right across the DoE, but the EPG fared particularly badly (see Table 1). Civil servants were withdrawn from international bodies and inter-departmental committees, and production of major policy reviews ceased. In 1983, it was reported that civil servants were ‘largely preoccupied with routine administration and increasingly with reacting to international initiatives rather than evolving the UK’s own environmental policies’.88 On the surface, the United Kingdom’s attempts to stymie the Europeanization of policy appeared to be working well. For instance, new directives were signed that did not appear to require extensive changes to British practice. The DoE also (incorrectly) relied upon administrative circulars to minimize the Europeanization of national legal systems. But at a deeper level, European environmental ideas and concepts were insinuating themselves into the British polity, forcing the DoE to revise its organizational assumptions. For example, judgements by the European Court of Justice for breaches of water law sharpened the legal meaning of EU directives, and the Commission stepped up its enforcement effort. Slowly but surely, the impact of EU polices began to escape from the narrow confines of EPG and intrude into the DoE’s mainstream business, as in the case of water and then energy privatization. Eventually, the DoE’s high command began to appreciate to its great surprise (and cost) that it could not achieve major policy objectives in these and other, previously ‘non-environmental’ areas such as transport (for example, road building), because of seemingly ‘technical’ commitments that had been rather too easily entered into. One senior civil servant recalls: ‘We gradually began to realise there were elephant traps 85

M. Holdgate, A Perspective on Pollution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For instance, see W. Waldegrave, ‘The British Approach’, Environmental Policy and Law, 15 (1985), 106–15. 87 A. Jordan and J. Greenaway, ‘Shifting Agendas, Changing Regulatory Structures and the “New” Politics of Environmental Pollution Control’, Public Administration, 76 (1998), 669–95, p. 686. 88 Environmental Data Services, ENDS Report, 107 (1983), p. 12. 86

276

JORDAN

under everything. We didn’t always understand the complications, but we were aware they [directives] were very tricky and influential. Ministers … simply didn’t understand what was going to be involved in implementing them.’89 In many respects the encoded experiences of the past selectively filtered the input and interpretation of new information (the subterranean Europeanization of policy), thereby restricting further learning. For example, the DoE behaved very negatively during the negotiation of the Single European Act, which gave EU policy an enormous fillip by introducing qualified majority voting (QMV), because it could only see Brussels as a source of new policy problems (i.e. costly and disruptive policies) rather than a means of exerting leverage over cognate departments.90 After the Act had been ratified, EU environmental policy developed extremely rapidly, driven by environmental departments in pacesetter states such as Germany and the Netherlands. National environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, which opened a Brussels office in 1988, also ‘learned’ the advantages of lobbying in Brussels, thereby politicizing the process of European integration still further. However, the DoE’s attempts to improve its handling of European work had to wait for enough political crises, which stemmed from the growing misfit between EU and British policies, to stack up to ‘unfreeze’ the department’s culture.91 Eventually, Prime Minister Thatcher intervened by ordering a major inter-departmental review.92 This identified Europe as a major cause of the political problems and claimed that the DoE ‘did not seem to have the capacity to keep up with European and international developments, let alone keep ahead of the game’.93 As the sense of crisis within the DoE became more acute, the then secretary of state, Nicholas Ridley (1986–89), began to actively intervene in EPG’s daily affairs, winning important inter-departmental battles on issues like acid rain and marine pollution. These increasingly international activities demanded extra resources, and EPG began to grow in size relative to other parts of the DoE (see Table 1). Unprecedented attempts were made to reach out to Europe. Meetings with the Presidency of the EU and the European Parliament were organized in 1988. Ridley also commissioned an environmental non-governmental organization, the Institute of European Environmental Policy, to report on the implications of Europeanization. It concluded that the DoE was ‘structured to deal with national problems and to developing and implementing national policies’. It must ‘now adjust [itself] to being part of a larger system that exists to develop and implement EC policies’.94 1988–2000: The Europeanization of National Structures In July 1989, Thatcher replaced Ridley with Chris Patten, a younger and more media-friendly politician, to cement these changes into place. Patten did so by attending Environment Councils in person and creating EPEUR. In 1993, civil servants reported to ministers that: ‘Our aim has been as far as possible to take a proactive approach. We have 89

A. Semple, interview with the author (London: 9 December 1999). A. J. Jordan, ‘National Environmental Ministries: Managers or Ciphers of European Union Environmental Policy?’ Public Administration, 79 (2001), 643–64. 91 Or, to be more accurate, pre-existing mixture of cultures (see above). On this point, see Cortell and Peterson, ‘Altered States’, p. 184. 92 Environmental Data Services, ENDS Report, 123 (1985), p. 3. 93 Environmental Data Services, ENDS Report, 133 (1986), p. 3. 94 N. Haigh and D. Baldock, Environmental Policy and 1992 (London: IEEP, 1989), pp. 47–8. 90


277

a rolling programme of discussions at least annually at both official and Ministerial level with many Member States, and we encourage policy Divisions to establish direct contacts with their opposite numbers.’95 Slowly, the DoE began to adjust its assumptions about how the world worked, i.e. if the Europeanization of policy could not be blocked, the only credible alternative was actively to steer it in a direction that better fitted national practices. So the EPG began to upload some of the new policies that it had developed in the late 1980s, such as integrated pollution control, eco-auditing and environmental management systems. Crucially, these policies could be uploaded because they departed from the old, ‘British approach’ to pollution control. By the early 1990s, the DoE had identified new ways to correct some of its earlier ‘errors’, but it had still not fully ‘unlearnt’ the past. The EPG had comprehensively reformulated its organizational assumptions, artefacts and values, but other groups in DoE retained a much more parochial worldview. A comprehensive, cross-departmental review of the entire department’s handling of European policy had to await the arrival of another secretary of state, John Gummer. Having moved from the more Europeanized setting of MAFF, Gummer could see that parts of his new department were still not ‘thinking European’: They [civil servants] thought of it as something over there. There was a sort of dissatisfaction that things which they had signed up to were now turning out to demand much more than they expected … The Department hadn’t quite learnt that it had to take responsibility for what it had agreed. It was a question entirely of coming to terms with reality.96

By now, EPG was no longer a neglected backwater, but a model of how the DoE should interface with the outside world. Thus, Gummer established a European professionalism initiative, headed by the EPG. It had a number of key elements, including a renewed effort to place DoE officials in UKREP and the Commission, and to encode their experiences in the organization’s culture; a more structured programme of training and awareness raising; closer bilateral contacts with the Commission and other national environmental departments; and the publication of an internal handbook on how to play the Brussels game.97 EU work is now regarded as a hugely important aspect of career development, as is language training. These changes demonstrate that the DoE has learned a new culture by altering its assumptions, values and artefacts, though often in response to the Europeanization of policy rather than in anticipation of it. V. N A T I O N A L S T R U C T U R E S : R E S I L I E N T O R T R A N S F O R M E D ?

Existing scholarship identifies a puzzling contrast between the ‘deep’ Europeanization of policy and politics and the somewhat ‘shallower’, more incremental and less openly political Europeanization of national administrative structures. The purpose of this article was to investigate the extent to which a more agent-centred view of events in one critical case challenges this common assumption. On one level, it confirms that national structures were indeed highly resilient. EU membership has completely transformed the DoE’s task environment by transforming the very foundations of national environmental policy, including national policy paradigms and the policy instruments used to implement them. It has also generated intense political conflicts, which eventually spilled into the realms 95 96 97

DoE, MINIS 14, Part 4 (DEPA) (DoE: London, 1993), p. 4. J. Gummer, interview with the author (London, 6 March 2000). J. Humphreys, A Way through the Woods (London: DoE, 1996).

278

JORDAN

of party politics. But a cursory inspection of the DoE’s structure suggests that the ‘EU effect’ on administrative structures has been extremely limited. Machinery of government changes have completely altered the overall shape of the department, but rarely was Europe a dominant, motivating factor. The rules, procedures and conventions governing its relationship with other actors such as Parliament and cognate departments in Whitehall, have changed, but again, not dramatically so. The DoE has also created new institutions to cope with the extra volume of European work (such as bilateral contacts with the Commission and other environment departments) but in large part these follow, rather than depart significantly from, pre-existing conventions and traditions. EU inspired structural change therefore appears to have been undramatic and relatively path-dependent. However, if we widen the definition of structure to include the institutional software or culture of the department, the combined ‘EU effect’ is significantly greater. The impact of the EU is certainly revealed in the appearance of new organizational artefacts such as the negotiating guide, the adoption of more communautaire language, and the use of more European negotiating tactics.98 All these demonstrate the DoE’s greater ability to play the Brussels game. Departmental objectives expressed in annual reports have also changed in response to the Europeanization of policy. For instance, in 1984 the head of the Water Directorate promised to ‘maintain international acceptance of the UK approach to managing and improving water’ by blocking EU initiatives and seeking derogations.99 Six years later, his successor wrote: ‘standards … are increasingly being set in Brussels’ so ‘we [must] put much more effort into influencing the Commission at the formative stage of policy making’.100 These changes were in turn underpinned by deeper and more fundamental alterations to the most fundamental element of culture – the DoE’s organization-wide assumptions. These changes occurred in three stages. Initially, the DoE regarded Europe as an essentially unimportant and unthreatening sphere of policy, and the scope for learning and adaptation were greatly circumscribed by the path dependent effect of inherited structures and cultural assumptions. In many respects, the ‘sedimented knowledge’ it inherited from its predecessors nurtured this somewhat parochial view of the world. As an organization, the DoE assumed that European venues were not and would not become important. It assumed that the locus of environmental policy was and should remain international or national, not European. Contrast the DoE’s preparations for the 1972 UN Stockholm Summit (extensive, involving the secretary of state) and the subsequent summit in Paris that launched EU environmental policy (much less intensive, mostly concerning civil servants). Because of this assumption, relatively little effort was made to upload policies to Brussels, a relaxed view was taken of early directives and implementation was not given the political or legal priority which the Commission subsequently demanded. In effect, the DoE’s organizational culture and adherence to pre-existing approaches blinded it to the importance of what was happening around it. With hindsight, the 1970s was a decade of ‘superstitious learning’. The apparently successful negotiation of early directives (for instance, on dangerous substances) undoubtedly nourished ‘a view widely held – and certainly held within the [DoE] – that Community environmental policy had little or no effect in Britain’.101 98 99 100 101

For examples, see Humphreys, A Way through the Woods. DoE, MINIS 6, Part 6, WD (London: DoE, 1984), section 2.03, p. 10. DoE, MINIS 11, Part 4, WD (London: DoE, 1990), section 2.04, p. 19. Haigh, EEC Environmental Policy and Britain, p. i.


279

The second period commenced in the late 1970s as the EU began insidiously to Europeanize UK policy. The transmogrification of the early water directives forced a change of attitude within the department, which was (belatedly) to appreciate the importance of the EU while continuing to restrict its influence. Rather than tackle the roots of the problem, it sought refuge in the most defensive routine available to it, the national veto, and mounted a spirited defence of the British approach. It also sought to disavow its European commitments by partially implementing directives adopted in the 1970s. In many respects, this was classic single loop learning: the DoE tried to deal with the symptoms of political problems rather than their root cause – namely the growing ‘misfit’ between national and EU policy: There was an underlying failure to see that … law making … would increasingly go on in Brussels … And when we realized we had to give it higher priority … we were like the Red Queen and Alice running as fast as we possibly could to stay in the same place. With hindsight we should have established a European environmental unit in the DoE as soon as we had joined the Community, staffed with high flying civil servants … so we could shape European policy.102

The cultural change was completed in the early 1990s when the DoE began to realize that the EU could actually be a force for good; that is, a means to improve domestic environmental protection. Only when the DoE had made this cognitive leap, could it work with the grain of EU policy making rather than deny the EU’s existence and block its influence. Commission officials have recently commented on the DoE’s ability to kill off uncongenial proposals while successfully promoting those it uploads.103 These alterations, which occurred at all three levels of organizational culture in the DoE, were not, as Bulmer and Burch would expect, achieved smoothly or undramatically. Crises played an important role in ‘unfreezing’ existing practices and cultural assumptions. These external pressures were, as OL theories would predict, also mediated and greatly delayed by pre-existing institutional elements and inherited knowledge. One example was the relatively parochial and ‘weakly’ environmental attitude that the DoE inherited from its predecessors in the form of ‘sedimented knowledge’. Another was the water and air directorates’ deep commitment to the British approach.104 By the mid 1970s, the DoE was effectively ensnared in a competency trap of supporting a policy approach that was inappropriate to continental European problem. Path dependence continued to hamper learning throughout the 1980s in that the DoE’s institutionally pre-defined response to European political pressures created a legacy of ill feeling that soured relations for well over a decade. Instead of thinking critically when confronted with errors, DoE officials fell back upon ‘defensive routines’ and ‘reasoning’. There was, as the former head of the EPG’s international division recalls, little or no incentive to upload UK policy: ‘it was very difficult to take the initiative in Europe … We were always reacting. You got no credit and considerable discredit for throwing a stone into the Brussels pond and looking to see what happened to the ripples. “Leave it alone” is what we were told!’105 The barriers to cultural change were not, of course, entirely institutional, but they had strong institutional underpinnings. For instance, although cognate departments such as 102

M. Holdgate, interview with the author (Trumpington, 30 March 2000). N. Hanley, ‘Britain and European Policy Process’, in P. Lowe and S. Ward, eds, British Environmental Policy and Europe (London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 57–66. 104 The two oldest and most mature areas of domestic policy. 105 F. McConnell, interview with the author (London, 8 October 1999). 103

280

JORDAN

agriculture and industry were generally pro-European, they were instrumental in supporting the DoE’s reactive attempts to stymie the Europeanization of national environmental policy. They did not encourage the DoE to be more proactive, even though this had the paradoxical effect of making the misfits worse. Moreover, it is very doubtful whether the DoE would have been more pro-active had cognate departments and the cabinet been less constraining, because it was intrinsically suspicious of the EU and only weakly environmental. What role did party politics play? In large part, ministers were structurally compelled by policy developments to treat the EU in the way that they did. Admittedly, there were deeply Eurosceptical ministers working within Eurosceptical cabinets both before (such as Peter Shore) and after (for instance, Michael Howard) the cultural turning point in the late 1980s. But whereas Shore was able to turn his back on Europe, his successors (Howard included) have had little choice but actively to engage in Europe, irrespective of whether they hoped to upload ‘British’ policy to Brussels or block a particular Commission proposal. These sectoral dynamics, to which the department’s culture has had to re-adjust, operated over much longer time periods than the electoral cycle. This leads to what is probably the most fundamental European impact of all, which is that the EU has helped to make the DoE a more environmental department than it would otherwise have been. In a sense, the EU helped the DoE to find a culture. This change, which has occurred at the deep level of organizational values and assumptions, owes much to the ‘uncongealing’ effect of political crises, created by the misfit between European and British policies. As the number of ‘errors’ began to stack up, the DoE found itself in the awkward (and eventually untenable) position of having to implement selectively or very slowly directives it had sanctioned. When these ‘backwater’ issues began to disrupt the mainstream areas of the DoE’s business, ministers were forced to go on to the front foot and shape EU policy to fit the department’s interests. In order to achieve this, organizational assumptions and values about the EU’s role in policy making first had to be challenged, then ‘unlearnt’. This gave DoE officials new impetus to challenge existing cultural assumptions and overcome opposing departments.106 In effect, the department first had to find a culture (by becoming more environmental) before it could become more European in its outlook and activities. However, we should be careful not to overstate the ‘EU effect’. There were, of course, also strong national and international environmental pressures pushing Britain towards stronger environmental policies. But the EU made these sharper, first by enshrining them in legally binding policies, and second by insisting upon compliance to the letter. Other national-level policies were also undoubtedly important. For instance, throughout the 1980s the DoE shed many of its non-regulatory functions such as public works in accordance with the precepts of new public management, though its overall impact (an increase in the relative size of the EPG) was greatly accentuated by the growth of EU environmental rules. Finally, the politicization of environmental issues in the 1980s would have produced some change in the sector, but the crises they provoked would almost certainly have been less dramatic without the EU’s involvement. The obvious question is has the DoE ‘learned’ as an organization to think and act more European? Some would regard the willingness to challenge and re-shape the pre-existing amalgam of organizational cultures as evidence of double loop learning, albeit in a reactive and much delayed form. Given that OL is first and foremost an intentional process, perhaps a better acid test is whether the change has improved the DoE’s 106

Cortell and Peterson, ‘Altered States’, pp. 187 et seq.


281

operational effectiveness.107 Here the evidence is much more mixed. To the extent that greener states such as Germany are bitterly complaining that recent Commission proposals have a ‘distinctly British flavour’,108 the DoE’s ability to project domestic approaches probably has improved. However, ‘thinking (and acting) European’ does not necessarily guarantee a favourable outcome on every single issue – even those that you have initiated. For instance, the DoE did much to provoke interest in integrated pollution control, but through the course of the EU negotiations its proposal evolved into a form that was not entirely to the DoE’s liking.109 European policy making is extremely complex and unpredictable, and even the most ‘European’ national departments struggle to learn. V I. C O N C L U S I O N S

To conclude, a deeper and more agency-centred investigation of structural change uncovers a much deeper, sudden and dramatic ‘EU effect’ than is commonly supposed. Without denying the inhibiting effect of pre-existing institutional structures, there are obviously occasions when the EU does provoke sudden, dramatic shift in a department’s culture. Our case reveals that these changes were associated with more obvious much less dramatic alterations in the codes, rules and conventions documented in the extant literature. Finally, the three levels of organizational culture – namely artefacts, values and assumptions – provide a useful taxonomy for measuring the extent of that change. There are obviously limits to what can be inferred from this single, albeit critical, case. However, the discovery of significant structural changes in this case does suggest a number of promising directions in which Europeanization research might proceed in the future. First, the Europeanization of politics, policy and structures should be studied as a single, co-evolving process of change in which departments play an important, though structurally constrained, mediating role. By employing a process-tracing approach, this article has revealed that the pre-existing structure and organizational culture of the DoE influenced the negotiation of individual directives, which in turn, shaped the Europeanization of policy. The unforced ‘errors’ made by DoE in the 1970s and 1980s helped politicize UK environmental policy in ways that have, paradoxically, altered its departmental interests and culture. Future research might usefully employ a similar approach to understand whether other countries and other sectors have had similarly traumatic experiences of Europeanization, or whether some departments in some countries/sectors are consistently better at ‘thinking European’. Secondly, future studies might usefully explore the precise relationship between the Europeanization of these three domains – policy, politics and polity. For instance, do more Europeanized departments necessarily operate in more Europeanized policy sectors of the United Kingdom? At the moment there appears to be no clear pattern, with both strongly Europeanized (for example, DTI) and weakly Europeanized (for example, the Treasury) departments operating in weakly Europeanized policy areas, i.e. industrial and macroeconomic economic policy respectively.110 Current research does not assess the extent to which these differences reflect the ability of the two departments to domesticate European 107

Argyris and Scho¨n, Organisational Learning, p. 323. R. Wurzel, ‘Britain, Germany and the European Union’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, London School of Economics, 1999), p. 123. 109 J. Skea and A. Smith, ‘Integrating Pollution Control’, in Lowe and Ward, eds, British Environmental Policy and Europe, pp. 265–82. 110 A. Menon and J. Hayward, ‘Conclusions’, in H. Kassim and A. Menon, eds, The EU and National Industrial Policy (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 275. 108

282

JORDAN

policy making in their respective sector, or some combination of European and national-level factors. In our case, the Europeanization of policy preceded the Europeanization of state structures and the generation of political crises, but it is a moot point whether more Europeanized departments deliberately facilitate the Europeanization of national policy to achieve their institutional interests.111 A study conducted by the DTI in 1992,112 suggested that UK departments do not over-implement EU policy, although evidence of so-called ‘goldplating’ has recently emerged in the UK agricultural sector.113 Finally, there is an urgent need for more comparative work, which explores both the institutional hardware and the software of national structures. Future research might investigate the extent to which other national departments have undergone a similar cultural change as the DoE. Until now, the ‘transformation of the state’ thesis has mainly preoccupied Europeanists, who have traditionally assumed that European integration occurs ‘above the heads’ of states without affecting them directly. Bridges now need to be built with scholars working within the national contexts where Europeanization occurs (see above). However, the findings reported in this article add weight to the claim that the ‘European state is undergoing an ineluctable, often imperceptible process of change little noticed by the general public’.114 111 112 113 114

Jordan, The Europeanization of British Environmental Policy. DTI, Review of the Implementation and Enforcement of EC Law in the UK (London: HMSO, 1992). Cabinet Office, Environmental Regulations and Farmers (London: Cabinet Office, 2000). A. He´ritier et al., Ringing the Changes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996), p. 331, p. 341.