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Re-socializing Firms: The Transnational Dissemination of British Environmental
Management Norms
Kelly Kollman
Carleton College
Paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science
Association, Chicago, 2-5 September, 2004.
After decades of widely reported decline, somewhere in the mid 1990s the UK—or
more poetically Britannia—became cool again. Its long suffering economy suddenly
became the power horse of the somewhat beleaguered European market. It also produced,
at least initially, a political superstar in Tony Blair who seemed to be the most eloquent
spokesman yet for the left’s new great hope, the third way. Somewhat less noticed has
been the increased leadership role that the UK has played in the area of environmental
policy, especially within the European Union. Dubbed the “Dirty Man of Europe” in the
1980s, the UK government, under both Major and Blair, began to adjust its policy style
where necessary to EU demands and to make a conscious effort to imbue the EU and other
international policymaking forum with its own environmental vision in the 1990s. Its
successes in this latter effort, while largely unnoticed, have been considerable.
EU environmental policy was virtually non-existent until the 1980s. When it did
arise it did so largely under the influence of the Scandinavian and then German
governments. The latter’s penchant for strict, legalistic standard setting did not mesh well
with the UK’s less prescriptive, more informal and voluntaristic policy style. This clash of
styles led to a decade of bitter debates between the environmental pioneer states and the
UK, which quickly acquired the label of environmental laggard. These debates largely
came to an end when the UK incrementally adjusted its own policy style to the more
legalistic continental approach by incorporating a number of formal standards into its legal
framework. At the same time it decided to take a more proactive approach to
environmental policy both at home and abroad.
If EU environmental policy in the 1980s was dominated by the German regulatory
approach, the EU legislation of the 1990s clearly borrowed from and was influenced by the
very different British model. The EU Commission started relying less on prescriptive
standard setting aimed at directly controlling emissions and began promoting more
procedural, voluntaristic and market based policies. The Freedom of Access to
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Convention