Assessing conventional wisdom: Environmental challenges and opportunities beyond eastern accession

Central and East European (CEE) states are implementing sweeping environmental policy reforms as they gain EU membership. This concluding chapter draws attention to key arguments in the volume and elaborates on four key themes that enrich conventional notions about Europeanisation and challenge prevailing views about the impacts that CEE states are having on environmental quality in an enlarged EU: the importance of capacity limitations and efforts to address them, the pesence of mixed messages and conflicting EU priorities, the importance of non-state actors, and the need for multi-directional exchange of ideas and information. These themes suggest, among other things, that EU officials and programs are capable of greatly improving some areas of environmental policy in CEE countries even as they make some areas of policy and societal behaviour less sustainable. This essay includes discussions of some possible ramifications of a larger EU for global environmental governance and some lessons from the 2004 enlargement that may inform understanding of future rounds of EU expansion.