EU integration mechanisms affecting Hungarian public policies in waste management

The European Union’s integration activity and style of governance in relation to the public policy of member-states have undergone a strong learning process over the last 15 years. Legal means have been coupled with open methods of coordination, so that compulsory change is joined by incentives based on exchanging experience. With the spread of the European pattern of environmental protection, the EU has learnt much from earlier enlargements, adding to legal harmonization allocation of substantial resources to developing its capacity to enforce the acquis communautaire in acceding countries.

The effects of the adaptation process have been uneven in every dimension of public policy. While waste-management tools, especially legal tools, have fallen wholly into line with EU patterns, declared objectives in many cases pay only lip service to the objectives advanced by the EU. This means that governance has been guided by infrastructural and material conditions and by governmental traditions more strongly than by declared objectives. Over the last 15 years, the government’s environmental institution building has taken a course it would probably have followed in a similar way if Hungary had not integrated into Europe. An exception is precisely the institutional behaviour patterns concerning multi-level governance: efforts to mobilize a wide range of tools for harmonizing interests of various levels of government, economic sectors and civil society. These have largely developed in reaction to EU
regulations and financing conditions.

However, this has proved too little to help Hungary’s infant environmental policy keep pace with the clear development of tools. Among the reasons for the government’s uneven performance, there are numerous factors pointing to inadequacies in the style of governance: superficial imitation of EU patterns, unfortunate choices of centralization patterns, lack of accord between ministries, party political influence over professional matters, and ambiguous relations with the civil sector.

Hungary’s waste-management policy has certainly undergone radical reforms in the last decade, in no small measure through adaptation to EU integration. The driving forces have been adaptation to EU legal patterns, enforcement institutions, financing frameworks and planning activity. These and the coming of a waste-management market have spread EU patterns to Hungary’s institutions and their networks.

Yet the positive impacts have appeared in environmental protection only to a limited extent. Standards of waste management in Hungary lags well behind the EU norm. There are numerous causes of this: cost of running existing outdated waste-management infrastructures, high costs of modernizing them, legal difficulties with creating a new type of cooperation network, institutional incompetence, misinterpretation of local-government powers, supposed and real distortions of competition observed in the wastemanagement market, and lack of social capital.

Hungarian waste management policy is centralized, but it cannot be regarded as purely a top-down managed activity, as it includes continuous relaying and representation of the interests of microlevel actors. The multiple levels seen as an EU requirement are spreading in the style of governance of waste management policy, but at the same time, familiar, habitual patterns of centralization are reestablishing themselves.