European Union

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On 23 and 24 March, EU hosts a meeting of 34 Libyan mayors and local leaders as part of the UN-led Libyan Political Dialogue.

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After a string of bad-tempered, late-night summits, leaders from across the EU agreed an ambitious programme of policies to try to solve the refugee crisis.

There has been one – pretty major – hitch: member states have so far been reluctant or unable to do what they said they would. Now, in a bid to get national capitals to hurry up, Operation Guilt Trip is go.

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The literature on European environmental policy has rapidly expanded over the last ten years. Between 2010 and 2015, there were over seven hundred articles about the European Union and environmental policy, compared to only two hundred and fifty articles between 2000 and 2005.[1] Ironically, given its focus, much of this literature is written outside of the major European studies journals.[2]  However, it is important to study the topics and approaches that environmental policy scholars use when publishing in European studies journals because of the key role these journals play in the field.[3] Therefore, in this post I explore environmental policy articles in two of these journals: the Journal of European Public Policy (JEPP) and the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS).[4] JEPP and JCMS were chosen because they “play an integrating function by holding the various subfields of EU studies together”.[5]

To keep the analysis manageable, I examined environmental policy articles in JEPP and JCMS that were published between January 2010 and October 2015. I searched article titles and keywords for environmental topics, which led to a total of thirty-six articles in both journals (eleven in JCMS and twenty five in JEPP). This amounts to approximately 4% of the articles published in these two journals during this time.[6] I then categorized the articles along two dimensions: the environmental issue studied (“climate change” or “other environmental issues”[7]) and whether the article dealt with internal EU/European policy or the EU’s external policy in international negotiations.

The results of this analysis are shown below (the full list of articles is available here). Eleven articles focus on EU/European internal climate change policy (including the EU Emissions Trading System and the Biofuels Directive). Nine focus on the EU’s role in international climate negotiations, six on external EU environmental policy more generally , and ten on internal non-climate policy.

Environmental policy articles in JEPP and JCMS (2010-2015), categorized according to environmental issue and internal/external focus

What this matrix does not show is the relationship between these thirty-six articles. Here I focus on one aspect: the references that the articles cite in common. The articles being studied here cited a total of 1,702 references. Of these, 127 (~7%) were cited by more than one article.[8] I used this data to analyze when two articles cited the same source, and created a network visualization from the results.

JEPP/JCMS environmental policy articles, connected by the number of shared references

I followed this with a “network density” analysis, which looks at the percentage of articles that are connected to each other. The highest possible network density is 100%, if every article shared at least one reference with every other article. A network density of 0%, on the other hand, would mean that none of the articles shared any references in common.

The overall density of the thirty-six article network is 25%. When the analysis focuses only on climate change articles, the density is slightly higher (28%), while environmental and internal policy articles are lower than average (19% and 23% respectively). The real outlier is the external policy category, which has a much higher density, at 51% (see figure below).

JEPP/JCMS article categories, percentage of articles in each category which share at least one reference

The higher density of the external policy articles can also be shown by visualizing the network again and color coding the articles according to the internal/external dimension:

JEPP/JCMS environmental policy articles, connected by the number of shared references. Categorized into internal policy (blue) and external policy (red)

What explains the difference? One important factor seems to be that there are more central, influential references in the external policy category. For example, the internal EU policy category has eighteen sources tied for top citations, all with three articles citing each. In contrast, scholars working on external policy are more likely to cite the same articles. Especially influential is Ian Manners’ 2002 article on the EU’s international position as a “normative power” in international negotiations.[9]

Concluding thoughts

The articles I have analyzed make up a small percentage of those on European environmental policy, and an equally small percentage of the articles published in JEPP and JCMS. Therefore it isn’t clear whether the patterns identified here are representative of the entire literature on European environmental policy, or are only a feature of JEPP and JCMS articles.

Regardless, a few key points should be highlighted. This group of articles has a strong focus on climate change and the EU’s role as a negotiator in international institutions. What drives the focus on these topics? It could be a product of scholars’ interest, or alternatively due to choices made by the journals’ editors to accept certain types of research.

The network analysis suggests that the scholars publishing articles on the EU external environmental policy are more likely to cite from similar sources than scholars working on EU internal policy. There are a number of possibilities to explain this. One is that as a more recent field of inquiry, external policy-focused scholars are more likely to cite more references in common.

Finally, focusing on the big picture, this analysis has made me realize the sheer extent and variety of the literature on European environmental policy. As the field grows, this suggests that scholars working on these issues could reflect once again on this diversity and work to find connections between their work.

 

[1] Based on a search carried out in the Scopus database for documents with “environmental policy” and “European Union” in the title, abstract, or keywords, carried out on October 29, 2015 for the 2010-2015 time period (742 results), and on October 31 for the 2000-2005 time period (251 results).

[2] The top five journals were Energy Policy, Science of the Total Environment, Climate Policy, Land Use Policy, and Environmental Policy and Governance.

[3] Jensen, M.D., Kristensen, P.M., 2013. The elephant in the room: mapping the latent communication pattern in European Union studies. Journal of European Public Policy.

[4] Other European studies journals include European Union Politics, West European Politics, the Journal of European Integration, and the Journal of Contemporary European Studies.

[5] Jensen, M.D., Kristensen, P.M., 2013. The elephant in the room: mapping the latent communication pattern in European Union studies. Journal of European Public Policy, pg. 1. doi:10.1080/13501763.2012.699656

[6] 36 environmental policy articles out of a total of 940 articles (as of October 29, 2015).

[7] “Other environmental issues” included articles that focused on a non-climate topic (such as fisheries management) as well as those that looked at a broad range of issues (including climate change).

[8] This figure is an estimate based on the references available on Scopus. It should be considered an underestimate, due to the fact that some types of documents (e.g., European Commission communications) are relatively likely to be counted as distinct sources by the database.

[9] Manners, I., 2002. Normative Power Europe: A Contradiction in Terms? JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 40, 235–258. doi:10.1111/1468-5965.00353

 

The post Mapping five years of environmental policy research in European studies appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

General : On Wednesday and Thursday European Parliament President Martin Schulz will travel to Athens and Lesbos to discuss the migration crisis and will be present for the departure of the first relocated refugees from Greece.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

General : On Wednesday and Thursday European Parliament President Martin Schulz will travel to Athens and Lesbos to discuss the migration crisis and will be present for the departure of the first relocated refugees from Greece.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

General : The European citizens’ initiative was an innovation in the Lisbon Treaty that gave people the right to demand EU action on a particular subject provided they collect a million signatures. However, after three years no initiative has yet led to a new legislative proposal. The European Commission is preparing a review but MEPs already adopted on 28 October several ideas on how to improve the process. We spoke with report author György Schöpflin, a Hungarian member of the EPP group.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

General : The European citizens’ initiative was an innovation in the Lisbon Treaty that gave people the right to demand EU action on a particular subject provided they collect a million signatures. However, after three years no initiative has yet led to a new legislative proposal. The European Commission is preparing a review but MEPs already adopted on 28 October several ideas on how to improve the process. We spoke with report author György Schöpflin, a Hungarian member of the EPP group.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

General : King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands met EP President Martin Schulz during a visit to Brussels on Tuesday 3 October. The Monarch was also due to visit the European Commission and the Council on the same day as part of his country taking over the presidency of the European Council on 1 January 2016.

Source : © European Union, 2015 - EP

A guest contribution by Başak Alpan,
from the Middle East Technical University, Ankara.

Here’s one of the few good things about being a political science professor in Turkey: elections are never only boring econometrical calculations that no one is interested in, but each election gives you an ample amount of shock, perplexity, and challenge to cope with.

The parliamentary elections of 1st November are no exception to this rule. The ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), as a surprise to even its own cadres, increased its vote from 40 % to 49% compared to the previous elections on 7 June, which had been repeated due to the stalemate in coalition negotiations. For the opponents of the government, it was one more occasion of shock, perplexity and challenge.

Some 70 000 of them – mainly middle-class, educated, urban political activists – had decided to be more than just voters and bystanders. They had volunteered for the civic oversight of elections under the umbrella of the civic movement named ‘Vote and Beyond’.

‘Vote and beyond’ – the civic movement’s emblem.

‘Vote and Beyond’, which started as a movement in Istanbul in December 2013 (in the aftermath of Gezi Protests) became an association in April 2014. They have since become organised in half of the 81 provinces and were active in observing ballot boxes in the March 2014 local elections, August 2014 presidential elections and June 2015 parliamentary elections, aiming to make sure that the elections are realised impartially and without any rig.

The variety of volunteers that make up this movement gives evidence to the ‘shock-perplexity-challenge’ theorem mentioned above: there are social democrats, unwavering seculars sick of the conservative regime, anti-capitalist Muslims, liberals who have more recently been disenchanted with the AKP, socialists who struggle for peace and democracy, and more. According to a widely shared, self-ironical tweet, the political context in Turkey has become so surreal that it even turned previously poststructuralist anarchists into staunch guardians of elections.

As a member of this movement, I was an election observer in Ulubey yesterday, one of the relatively poor districts in Ankara. As I was travelling there along the misty hills of Ankara, I was aware of the fact that I would be meeting with a pre-dominantly conservative AKP electorate. The polling commission welcomed me, and during the nine hours I spent in the primary school classroom used as a polling station, we chatted, laughed, argued and exchanged views.

The inhabitants of Ulubey, however, had a different life agenda: they were concerned with the recent urban regeneration projects that would have a direct impact on their dwellings, and very upset about the influx of Syrian refugees to the district due to affordable rents and living conditions. ‘We were not even locking our doors here before the migrants arrived’, one of the voters said. Note that all these highly political issues were however extremely personalised and bore no immediate connection to any political party or governmental policy. It simply was about their lives and their neighbourhood.

Still, at the end of the day, it became apparent that 68 per cent of the electorate of our classroom had voted for the AKP. The Guardian was right when it claimed after the Ankara bombings and their 102 victims on 10 October that even pain cannot bridge the current polarisation in Turkish society between conservatives and progressives. But that does not change the fact that any political dissident living in Turkey today has to pass that bridge every single day. Before wrapping yourself up into your daily self-induced, anti-government, dissident utopia, you buy your bread from a pro-AKP bakery, you take a cab with a pro-Erdoğan radio channel blasting; you live your life surrounded by them. They are normal people with normal lives, dreams, desires, feelings and experiences. It is just that they have different priorities and abstraction levels.

This is what we need to theorise and address if we really want to claim that another world is possible for Turkey.

Başak Alpan is Assistant Professor
in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration
at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara.

The French version of this post can be found in the ‘Mails from Europe’ series,
on the homepage of the EU-Asia Institute at ESSCA School of Management.

The post The Vote and Beyond : Lessons from the Turkish Repeat Elections appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

“My greatest strength as a consultant is to be ignorant and ask a few questions,” said Peter Drucker, the father of management consulting. Had we met Mr Drucker we’d probably have asked him “what are the right questions to ask in order to become a good consultant to our clients?” Unfortunately for us, Peter Drucker passed away 10 years ago – fortunately, FleishmanHillard organises the “FH Fundamentals” training every six months for young consultants from all over the EMEA region to get to know each other and further familiarise themselves with the values that make FH the best communications agency in the world.

The latest generation of “FH Fundamentalists” from Brussels, London, Paris, & Milan

But let’s cut to the chase – what are the five questions a communications and public affairs consultant should ask himself or herself in order to provide its clients with the best services?

• Do I have enough “face time” with my clients? Even if one works day and night on an account spending time face-to-face with their client will enrich the relationship and will enable to address issues that are to “sensitive” to be discussed over email.
• I am thinking creatively about my account? Beyond the day-to-day tasks it is very important to shake the status quo and present your clients with new ideas. All ideas are good – may they be big or small. At FleishmanHillard, we try to present our clients with one new idea a month – ambitious? Not at all, considering the diversity of expertise we have in our office.
• Is Twitter the be all and end all of communications channels? Not at all! Once our client’s communications objectives and messaging is approved there are a wide range of channels to disseminate messages in order to target the right audience. Think creatively – all your money doesn’t have to go to full page ads in media and all your energy doesn’t need to focus on advertorials!
• Is measuring results necessary? Yes – our clients are constantly connected and want to feel in control of the information they receive. Hence, measuring results is paramount to developing productive relationships with them. However, all measurement is not good measurement. Our objectives need to be clear and mutually agreed from the very beginning and data should be analysed in a relevant way to fit the client’s business and advocacy objectives.
• I’m a young consultant – does this mean I should be terrified of presentations? Quite the opposite! Make sure you know what your role is; don’t read out a script (last time someone read you a story was probably your mother trying to send you to sleep); focus on the audience’s needs; keep eye contact with EVERYONE in the room; interact with your audience by asking questions – and above all REHEARSE. Assuming you know your subject, simple steps are the key to minimizing the pre-presentation stress.

In the FH pyramid of training FH Fundamentals is the basis – as we know the basis is the most important part; it ensures stability. And for communications consultants having good bases is key to understanding our clients’ needs. We may have not drunk from the Holy Grail however we did ask ourselves some questions about our current accounts – now it’s up our managers to embrace our improved selves!

Immavera & Adrien working on their mock pitch with colleagues from London and Munich

Building on Peter Drucker’s inspiring quotes, we too would like to contribute to the Consultant Hall of famous quotes, with a somewhat more impertinent twist to it.

For instance, young FH consultants like to say: “My colleagues are my best friends and my family at the same time.” What we mean: “I spend more time with my colleagues than with my friends and family combined.” Also heard: “I feel privileged to be exposed to such a high degree of expertise on a daily basis.” What that young and dynamic FH consultant actually means: “I can speak in acronyms for hours on end without ever feeling the need to rely on actual words.”

The latest “FH Fundamentalists”, Immavera Sardone, Ilektra Tsakalidou, and Adrien Rorive