Policy Integration for Complex Environmental Problems

The quest for policy integration crystallized in the 1990s as awareness was growing that the current supply of narrow sectoral and little coordinated or even overlapping and conflicting policies could not cope efficiently and effectively with contemporary complex cross-cutting and interdependent socio-environmental problems. Combining and coordinating policies properly promises to address this institutional misfit add value to policies support planning at national and sub-national levels and facilitate the transition to sustainable development more generally. This book proposes a comprehensive conceptualization of policy integration and negotiates pertinent theoretical methodological and applied issues from the perspective of selected EU policies - rural development regional development transport social economic environmental water resources and biodiversity policy. Mediterranean desertification an exceptionally complex socio-environmental problem is used as an illustrative example as the idea for this book transpired while researching the topic of policy making to combat desertification in the context of MEDACTION an EU-funded research project.