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The Future of the Cardiff process

Executive summary

Introduction

The ‘Cardiff process’ was initiated at the European Council meeting in Cardiff in the UK in June 1998. It requires the various formations of the EU Council of Ministers to develop comprehensive strategies to integrate environmental concerns into their policies and actions, with the aim of achieving sustainable development. It therefore seeks to make a major contribution to the objectives of Article 6 of the EC Treaty, requiring the integration of environmental considerations into effectively all other Community policies. Since 1998, successive meetings of the European Council have called upon nine formations of the Council to develop strategies in three ‘waves’ of three, and have received a number of strategies and progress reports.

The Göteborg summit in June 2001 was to be the deadline for the completion of the Council strategies, and the occasion for an overall stocktaking of the Cardiff process. However, delays in the completion of the strategies for the ‘third wave’ Councils required the postponement of this review. EU Heads of Government instead invited Councils to ‘finalise and further develop’ their strategies, and present the results to the Barcelona summit in March 2002.

However, since Göteborg, the momentum of the Cardiff process has faltered. At five of the six succeeding European Council meetings, neither the Cardiff process nor individual Council strategies have been mentioned in the Presidency conclusions. The Environment Council meeting in October 2002 in the aftermath of the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development called upon the European Council to reinforce the Cardiff process, and indeed extend it to formations of the Council that have so far not been included. Further development of the Cardiff process, and in what form, should depend, amongst other things, on an assessment of what it has achieved so far, and how it can be accommodated to the significant changes to the EU’s policy and institutional landscape over the past four years.

Strengths and Weaknesses of the Cardiff Process

Through its focus on the Council of Ministers, the Cardiff process has been an innovative and ambitious environmental policy tool, and Article 6 of the Treaty necessarily gives it a wide scope and overarching character. Environmental considerations have been put firmly on the agenda of a number of other Council formations as a result.

To date however, the Cardiff process has had mixed success, and progress has been uneven from one Council formation to the other. Its major positive achievement is to have promoted an increased understanding and sense of ownership of environmental issues in several Councils, and to have stimulated an important learning process. It has facilitated the development of integrative mechanisms such as the use of joint Councils and working groups, and in some Councils has stimulated groundbreaking work on sectoral environmental integration indicators. It has also had a positive influence on procedural innovations within the Commission and in some Member States.

On the other hand, detailed analysis has shown that the quality of some of the Cardiff strategies has been disappointing, and sometimes important integration issues have not been addressed fully, or at all¹. This partly reflects a lack of central co-ordination and guidance. Moreover, it has become apparent that the development of Council strategies requires the supportive involvement of the Commission – but where the Commission has become involved, in some cases tensions have been evident over policy priorities. And the recent lack of momentum has highlighted how dependent Cardiff has been on the priorities of individual Council Presidencies, emphasising the need to embed the process more firmly in a longer-term work programme for the EU as a whole.

Changing EU Institutional and Policy Context

Events have moved on over the past four years. A reinvigoration of the Cardiff process will need to take account of significant new developments. In terms of substantive policy, several parallel programmes or strategies have been launched, including the Sixth Environmental Action Programme (6EAP), the EU’s Sustainable Development Strategy, and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation. At the same time, the Commission is engaged in developing major reforms to several sectoral policies with major environmental impacts, such as the common agricultural and fisheries policies, the common transport policy, and the mid-term review of the Structural Funds. Council integration strategies will need to be closely co-ordinated with these separate initiatives, and reflect their priorities.

In terms of procedures and institutions, reforms to the operation of the Council agreed at the Seville Summit in June 2002 have enhanced the co-ordinating role of the new General Affairs and External Relations Council (GAERC) in relation to other Council formations, while streamlining and simplifying the agendas of the European Council. New procedures for multi-annual strategic policy planning have been introduced both for the Council and the Commission, into which an informal process such as Cardiff - only periodically steered by the European Council - will become increasingly difficult to fit. On the other hand, the Commission’s new procedures for sustainability impact assessment of major policy proposals could provide new opportunities for strengthening environmental policy integration.

These new policy and institutional developments will need to be reflected both in the content of Council integration strategies, and in the procedures through which they are developed, monitored and reviewed.

Defining the contents of integration strategies

The Cardiff European Council called for the inclusion of targets, timetables, indicators and regular monitoring and reporting procedures in sectoral integration strategies. These were to be defined by the Council formations themselves, and they were also given broad discretion to set their own integration objectives and options for achieving them.

While it is important to maintain the benefits of ‘learning by doing’, the changes in the policy and institutional context outlined above now mean that there is a need for greater central guidance and co-ordination in relation to the contents of individual Council strategies. Moreover, some of the tasks assigned by the Cardiff and subsequent summits to the Councils themselves would be more appropriately undertaken by other institutions.

Community competence differs significantly between different policy areas. There is therefore a need for greater differentiation between the Councils as regards their contributions to environmental integration. Some strategies – particularly in relation to transport or health – need to devote more attention to proposing actions at the level of the Member States, as Community action alone can probably not deliver sustainability.

For the content of Cardiff strategies, a minimum requirement should be to respond to relevant existing commitments in the 6EAP, the EU SDS and international environmental agreements including the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation, and to set out options for achieving them. These commitments need to be brought together in an overarching EU environmental strategy, or road-map. But at the same time, each Council should be proactive in relation to relevant 6EAP Thematic Strategies by proposing future actions that would contribute to their objectives.

As regards monitoring and reporting, appropriate integration indicators should be set with much more central input and guidance from the Commission, the European Environment Agency (EEA), the GAERC and/or the Environment Council, rather than being left in the hands of the individual Council formations themselves. First of all those council formations that have not developed integration indicators should be encouraged to do so. There is, however, also a growing need for consistency within an overall indicator framework, given the increasing prominence of Community indicators in the decision making process. The monitoring of progress against these indicators is also a task that might be allocated to the EEA. However, each Council should be required to report annually to the GAERC on its contribution to environmental integration. The report should also contain descriptions of all impact assessments undertaken by the Commission in policy areas falling within its responsibility; how relevant commitments in the 6EAP and other programmes have been taken into account; and what contribution the Council itself has made to the assessment.

Options for the Future of the Cardiff Process

There are strong arguments in favour of strengthening the Cardiff process as an initiative specifically directed at the Council, with a clear focus to environmental policy integration as required by Article 6 of the Treaty. Evidence from the 'first wave' Councils indicates that there would be considerable benefits in allowing sufficient time for the process to mature in respect of those Councils which have become involved at a later stage.

There are a range of measures that might be introduced to make the Cardiff process more effective. These are not mutually exclusive, and might be packaged in various ways. They do differ, however, in their level of ambitiousness.

It is clear that although the Cardiff process is focused on the Council, there is a need for the more systematic involvement of the Commission in the development and follow-up of integration strategies. There is arguably a need for greater guidance and co-ordination for individual Councils from both the Commission and the new General Affairs and External Relations Council, possibly in close cooperation with the Environment Council.

The Commission is the only EU institution with the resources to undertake proper strategy development, and should in the future have more active involvement in the Cardiff process. An important initial contribution from the Commission might be to compile an overarching road-map, on the basis of agreed EU and international environmental programmes. This should serve as a reference framework to set priorities for the integration strategies of individual Councils. The GAERC should be encouraged to take a proactive approach to the co-ordination of cross-cutting aspects of the work of sectoral Councils, including taking forward the environmental integration requirement set out in Article 6.

When the Cardiff process was launched, the EU had no sustainable development strategy. However, there is now an established mechanism for the annual steering and review of economic, environmental and employment/social policies at the highest level, by the Spring European Council. It is important, therefore, that priorities for environmental integration are reflected in the development and review of the EU SDS.

However, the EU SDS is a relatively new mechanism. There are also major conceptual difficulties with the vehicle chosen for its development – the extension of the existing Lisbon process. This is based on the so-called ‘Open Method of Co-ordination (OMC) for developing and reviewing the economic and employment policies of Member States. As matters stand, there is a danger that environment and environment-related policies will not be allocated sufficient attention in the preparation for the annual Spring summits. This was a feature of the synthesis report for the Barcelona Summit in March 2002. The environmental dimension of the EU SDS needs to be strengthened through the introduction of reporting and guidance mechanisms parallel to those which already apply to economic and employment policies. A crucial difference, however, is that the principal focus in this case should be the activities of individual Councils rather than the policies of the Member States.

Annual reporting should be introduced by sectoral Councils to the GAERC on their performance in relation to commitments in the EU's overarching environmental strategy or route-map, and to environmental integration generally. An Annual Implementation Report should be published by DG Environment, highlighting key issues and indicators to be addressed in the Commission’s Spring report. This would also inform the development by the GAERC of the triennial strategy for the Council and the annual operating programmes for each of its formations. Guidelines from the Environment Council to each relevant formation of the Council should be issued at the same time as the Broad Economic Policy and Employment Guidelines developed under the Lisbon Process.

In seeking to make the Cardiff process more effective, it is important to take account of all the wider changes that have occurred to EU governance and policy planning since its launch in 1998. The policy cycle associated with the EU SDS needs to be more strongly co-ordinated with the development of annual and multiannual work programmes of the Commission and the Council, which themselves need to work more closely together in moving towards a single EU policy planning process.

A new reporting and co-ordination cycle for environment policy in the framework of the EU SDS needs to be reflected in the parallel cycles for strategic planning and programming, within both the Commission and the Council. Mechanisms and procedures are needed for bringing more closely together the Commission's annual work programme and the Council's annual operating programme. These should be developed in the framework of a new Inter-institutional Agreement between the Commission, Council and European Parliament.

Figure 1 overleaf sets out how the Cardiff process could feed into the EU SDS, and how both processes could be co-ordinated with the strategic planning cycles of the Commission and the Council. This is an ambitious agenda, but progress can be made by tackling its various elements step by step.

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Figure 1:
Possible Interlinkages of Policy Activities