Environmental policies, institutional trajectories and international coordination constraints: household packaging waste management in Europe.

Summary The construction of a Community policy for the management of packaging waste must take into account the existence of uncertainties that are currently irreducible. These uncertainties prevent a precise vision of the advantages and disadvantages of possible solutions. An efficient management system cannot therefore be established on the basis of a determination of an optimal organizational and technical solution. The question becomes more relevant through a search for efficiency through coordination. It is the mechanisms that allow actors to coordinate over time that are important. The process that leads to the construction of rules, explicit or implicit, is crucial. We show that efficiency, in order to be reconciled with the viability of a management system over time, requires a coordination framework that is stable. A stable system has the characteristic of evolving over time without the introduction of new elements disturbing the actors' frame of reference. The latter can continue to behave with a better understanding of what their action will imply, especially for the actors with whom they seek to coordinate and who will interpret their action. Failing to reduce radical uncertainties, each actor acts in a situation of lesser uncertainty about the actions that conform to the coordination framework and pursues efficiency within this framework. We develop an explanatory model of the conditions that allow a regulator to develop a system of rules with stability. This model helps us to show, through the example of the European packaging directive, the limits of the regulatory process within the EU. The maintenance of a logic close to international negotiations limits the possibilities for a regulator to establish a system of rules consistent with the objectives posted. A first track is launched on the need to reform the European regulatory process. The second is the introduction of founding principles for a European "regime" that would allow actors, while respecting national institutional trajectories, an important condition for the stability of a system, to approach the question of organizational and technical choices from stable reference points.