A 'sustainable' impact on the EU? An analysis of the making of the Fifth Environmental Action Programme

This chapter begins with the assumption that political organisations are stable institutions which contain biases to benefit certain issues and actors in society. The European Union’s Fifth Environmental Action Programme was finally adopted by the Council in February of 1993. The programme is entitled Toward Sustainability and will guide the European Union’s environmental legislation into the next century. Since the Fifth Environmental Action Programme was heavily influenced by the Dutch National Environmental Plan it was also natural that the key participants in the networks which developed were Dutch. The temporal sorting model was developed as a theory about decision-making. Agenda setting is a matter of making a decision about which issues are important. The chapter considers the political climate in which the streams flow. Since social movements are dispersed in society they do not have the same type of political impact as organised political forces.