Rhetoric or Reality? : ‘New Governance’ in EU Environmental Policy

When scrutinizing the literature on EU environmental policy, it becomes apparent that there has been a comprehensive transition in regulatory 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 favor of economic and "contextoriented" instruments. In view of these developments, this article has two objectives: first, it looks into which causes and factors initiated these discussions; second, it analyzes the effects these reform ideas had on patterns of regulation. As will be shown, changes in regulatory ideas are only partially expressed in changes in policy instruments.