This book explores opportunities and requirements for the environmental governance of long-term problems of contemporary societies. It addresses an extremely relevant and pervasive global problem: the difficulty of developing and implementing effective long term policies.

The authors ask and seek to answer the question of what distinguishes long term problems from other policy problems, what governance responses are available and used, and how could the different governance mechanisms, namely economic incentives, participation, as well as knowledge and learning help to address them....

This book examines the development of a European environmental conscience through successive steps of European integration in energy policy.

In the 1960s-70s, the world was slowly beginning to realise that environment degradation was not sustainable. With phenomena such as acid rain, it became clear that pollution did not stop at national boundaries and the European environmental conscience developed in parallel to such growing environmental concerns. The oil crisis in 1973 was a turning point in the integration process for both energy policy and environment policy, and...