Greening the Common Agricultural Policy: the European Environmental Bureau lobbying action

As already explained, the particular institutional framework of the European Union favors (and especially welcomes) the thriving of lobbyists and the practice of lobbying inside institutional loci. This also happened as regards the lobbying aimed at bringing to the attention of policy makers the claim of the environment safeguarding, a claim that experienced a transformation from a general «street» movement into a specialized activity of contact and persuasion towards decision makers. The EU basically determined the fundamental transition of environmental movements into European institutions.

Doing this, environmental issues gained more attention and managed to be effectively heard by decision makers in a way they contributed to the policy making process. Yet, it was the only possible path to carry out environmental claims in Europe as operating beyond national borders and mobilizing a wide range of peoples and cultures towards a far-flung and complex entity is not an easy task. It was realized that mass mobilization was not a viable and effective means of influence compared to direct lobbying, even though sometimes it is possible to see in Brussels various protests directed at the European institutions (but very often they are also complemented by silent and direct bargaining with decision makers).

The first environmental organization that established a permanent presence in Brussels was the European Environmental Bureau in 1974. As said, the EEB is an umbrella organization that groups many national environmental organizations. At the time of its establishment, the environmental concern was peaking (the first oil crisis just broke out) and the need of the representation of environmental issues at European level was perceived. In the next chapter the birth and development of the EEB will be deeply treated along with its current role in the environmental lobbying. Anyway, for almost fifteen years, the EEB was the only significant organization to represent environmental interests in Brussels.

The diffusion of environmental groups with a permanent office in Brussels occurred in the same period other organized interests understood the convenience to be based in the Belgium capital. This happened in the mid-80s when the Single European Act (SEA) relaunched the European integration process and set the objective of establishing the Single Market, in this way extending the powers of the European Community. Starting from that moment, also large international environmental organizations joined the EEB and established a European office, namely Friends of the Earth (FoE), Greenpeace, and the World Wild Fund (WWF) for nature.

The proliferation of environmental groups in Brussels and the new trajectory taken by the lobbying action, more focused on European institutions, lies in the recognition that environmental issues have a trans-frontier impact and have to be tackled at a larger regulative level. The European Union represents this larger level.

The lobbying action of NGOs is basically shaped by the stages of the policy process.
These stages are mainly five as suggested by Long and Lörinczi:

* Early agenda setting phase (identifying issues not yet salient in the political process)
* Consultation period for new proposals (Green Papers and White Papers; see par. 1.4.1)
* Legislative activity in the Parliament and Council
* Post-legislative and pre-implementation
* Monitoring implementation and enforcement

The first two stages are those in which NGOs are considered to exert more influence and to be more effective. In fact, the greatest results of the environmental NGO lobbying action are seen in terms of agenda-setting, this means that they are able to prompt discussion about certain issues, to give inputs, but not always the fact of having conditioned the agenda translates into effective legislations. It has been already said that the Commission is the most receptive European institution to interest groups and especially for civil society groups.

Also environmental groups found responsiveness by the Commission, especially the decision makers «who are already sympathetic to their views, for example, DG Environment». The same reasoning applies to the European Parliament (the third phase of the policy process) where environmental groups mostly rely on Green MEPs. The European Parliament is also an important target for lobbyists since it gained an increasing of its powers with the introduction of the co-decision procedure. In this institution, the influence of lobbyists can be the highest, to the point that they can actually write the amendments in lieu of MEPs.

The Council, instead, is the most difficult EU institution to lobby, especially for NGOs. Being constituted of ministers of the Member States, the lobbying action is carried out within the single State towards the national government.
The last two phases of the policy process are again relevant for NGOs as they can find new space to act. In the implementation phase the Commission can again play a preeminent role in the «comitology» procedure in which representatives of countries and representatives of the Commission discuss on the implementation of European legislation. In some cases, representatives of the NGOs have been directly invited to take part to the Committees.

In the last phase, the monitoring of the implementation and the enforcement, NGOs are called to be the «watchdogs» and ensure that the norm is effectively applied in all the countries.
With the explanation of the different stages of the policy process in which is possible for environmental NGOs to carry out lobbying actions the first chapter concludes.

The main arguments have been introduced: the «institutionalization» of social movements in the guise of NGOs active in the lobbying arena; the European regulatory framework has been presented along with institutional spaces given to NGOs to represent collective interests; the way civil society groups at the European level through umbrella organizations and other coalitions; the rise of the environmental lobbying in Brussels. In the next chapter the focus will move on the work of a particular environmental organization: the European Environmental Bureau.