EU Environmental Governance: Vision of Polycentricity over Hierarchy

European policies that tackle issues related to environment and a vision for global environmental governance is remarkably different compared to sovereign nation-states. There is a progressive departure of environmental decision-making from national level to collective decision at the Union level. Main concept lies at the core of the European Union (EU) vision is multilateralism since it is promoted as a part of the forming identity of the “Union”. During the past decades environmental policies on local, national, EU and global levels have become associated with the rise of less hierarchical and more collaborative governance arrangements.Public-private partnerships, stakeholder dialogues, citizen juries and voluntary standards are part of the deliberative, participatory and market-oriented strategies that are utilized in the policy areas such as food safety, forestry and climate change. In the field of environmental policy, in particular the inclusion of non-stake actors into policy-making achieved prominence thanks to four EU directives pushing forward more collaborative forms of governance.