Doing is Believing: Participation and Use of Economic Assessments in the Approximation of EU Environmental Legislation in Eastern Europe

Abstract

Shared scientific understanding of environmental threats and possible responses is an essential basis for successful environmental cooperation. Yet, international consensus about policy-relevant knowledge is often difficult to achieve. Significant distributional implications of environmental agreements for multiple sets of actors can interfere with the process of effective knowledge building and communication. This paper will consider the role of environmental assessments in international environmental negotiations, and the characteristics that make assessment processes more effective tools for communication of expertise. It advances the proposition that the acceptance of knowledge by multiple actors with divergent interests depends critically on broad political consultation in the expertise-generation processes. A case study of the role of economic assessments in the political negotiations surrounding the approximation of EU air-quality legislation in Poland and Bulgaria, provides evidence in support of this argument. The empirical analysis also shows that achieving adequate participation in assessment processes is often a difficult task, and depends on the ability to embed the process within a rich institutional framework that would allow for the involvement of relevant audiences, while maintaining the boundary between expertise and politics.