SEA and regional planning: Overcoming the institutional constraints: Some lessons from the EU

The long lasting debate on the need for a European Directive on Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) now seems to be approaching closure, with a common position agreed by the European Council in December 1999, albeit applied to plans and programmes only and not to government policy. This paper considers the institutional structures within which such a directive would be implemented, structures far more complicated than those met by the project EIA Directive 97/11.

This paper reviews the existing but limited application of SEA to plans in Europe, in particular to regional plans, using an existing framework for the institutional analysis of integrated water management developed by Mitchell. The application of SEA to plans for regional structural funding by the European Commission, to regional and sub-regional plans in England, the Netherlands and Spain, suggests that it is the overall context that influences the observed variations in both SEA and plan-making practice. This highlights in particular the strength of the politico-environmental lobby and the relative powers of planning, sectoral and environmental executives. Approaches to SEA can be modelled as incremental (The Netherlands), stapled (Spain) and concurrent (England). It is perhaps the latter model, an iterative and multi-staged but weaker approach to SEA, that offers a future route to a wider form of sustainability appraisal.

How well the more formal and stronger application of SEA required by the European Union integrates into existing institutional structures remains to be seen.