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Jour Fixe with Jan-Henrik Meyer, 21 June 2010
06/18/2010
We are pleased to invite you to the next Jour Fixe presentation by Jan-Henrik Meyer on: "Appropriating the Environment. How the European Institutions received the Novel Idea of the Environment and made it their own". Vivien Schmidt will be discussant.
The Jour Fixe begins at 4.15 pm (16.15 Uhr) and takes place at Ihnestr. 26, Room 202.
Abstract
Environmental policy has become an important area of European Union (EU) policy making, even though it had not originally been foreseen in the Treaty of Rome. Its emergence in the early 1970s can be understood as a result of a transfer of the novel idea of the environment, namely that those problems we routinely conceptualise as part of environmental policy in fact belonged together and should be dealt with by policy makers. This paper seeks to analyse how this transfer of ideas took place, where the ideas came from, how (and why) they were taken up and adapted to the specific framework of the European Communities (EC). Starting with a brief introduction into the historical context, the paper outlines different channels of transmission and discusses different logics of reception – based on theoretical approaches to from political science and history. These concepts will subsequently be utilised to examine the transfer of ideas from the level of the UN to the EC in the context of the First Environmental Action Programme of 1973, which outlined the goals and arguably set the path for the emergence of the subsequent European environmental policy.
