EU environmental law contains several policies that aim at empowering and creating
democratic opportunities for individuals and groups vis-à-vis their governments. The Access to
Environmental Information Directive and the Environmental Impact Assessment Directive are two
cases in point. They grant citizens and environmental groups new rights in the licensing of
environmentally damaging projects and activities by providing them with access to relevant
information and by obliging public authorities to take their concerns into account in the decision-
making process. Yet, member state governments have been very reluctant to comply with these
policies as a result of which their effects on participatory politics have been limited. As we have
seen in the previous section, the EU’s compliance system provides citizens and groups with the
opportunity to litigate against their governments in order to help enforce EU law. But the
comparative case study on the enforcement of the two environmental directives in Germany and
Spain presented in the next section will show that citizens and groups have made uneven use of
these legal opportunities to enforce their rights.
Spain and Germany have been selected for the comparative case study because they differ
significantly with regard to their domestic opportunity structures. In Spain, public participation in
the policy process is restrained. Authoritarian state interventionism kept civil society weak. The
degree of societal self-organization used to be low, and policies have been made without any sub-
stantive participation of societal actors. This remains true also for the time after Spain’s transition
to democracy. Institutional channels for consultations with the different stakeholders have been
largely absent. Economic interests have been enjoying some informal but discontinuous relations
with the public administration, particularly at the implementation stage. Environmental authorities
also regularly consult specialist agencies and policy experts. Societal actors, by contrast, are still
largely excluded from the policy-making process (cf. Aguilar Fernández, 1997). The
environmentalist movement only started to form in 1973 mobilizing against nuclear power station
projects. While movement organizations were largely characterized by local activism and
ideological diversity, some environmental groups became more stable and less radical. They
started to finance themselves through membership contributions and public grants. Some of them
organized themselves in a national federation, the Coordinadora de Organizaciones de Defensa
Ambiental (CODA). Together with the Spanish sections of transnational environmental
organizations, such as Greenpeace, WWF, or Friends of the Earth, they have gained increasing
voice in the political process.
9
Convention