Resumen de Rhetoric or Reality?: 'New Governance' in EU Environmental Policy

Katharina Holzinger, Christoph Knill, Ansgar Schafer

• When scrutinising the literature on EU environmental policy, it becomes apparent that there has been a comprehensive transition in underlying governance ideas during the last two decades. At the core of these changes is the abolition of traditional patterns of interventionist command‐and‐control regulation in favour of economic instruments and ‘context‐oriented’ governance. In view of these developments, this article has two objectives: first, it looks into which causes and factors initiated these discussions; second, it analyses the effects these reform ideas had on actual patterns of governance. As will be shown, changes in governance ideas are only partially expressed in changes in policy instruments.