By contrast, the Community has few agents to carry out its policies. The Community is therefore driven to producing legislation that places obligations on the Member States to achieve desired results. This means that Community policy, unlike national policy, is made explicit in items of legislation which is often very detailed, but which inevitably also leaves some measure of discretion to the Member States. This helps to explain the volume of EU environmental legislation graphically illustrated in Figure 2.1.2. A consideration only of these items of legislation cannot therefore give a complete picture of Community policy since all they can do is to set out the intentions of policy. To discover whether these policy goals are being achieved it is necessary to examine how they are being implemented within the Member States. Community policy cannot therefore be regarded as some abstract concept existing on its own and separate from national policies. Community policy only comes to life when it is implemented in the Member States and has thereby become inseparably intertwined with national policies and practices. Since there are now 25 Member States it is an immense task to provide a complete account of how Community policy is being implemented, and to assess its effectiveness (although this is a task that the European Environment Agency has now begun to address – see section 11.4).

This Manual, while founded on the idea that Community policy is very much more than a collection of legislative texts, considers the effects of those texts in only one country: quite different effects can be expected in others.

Although legislation is the principal means for expressing Community policy in several fields, including the environment, in yet other fields, such as regional and agricultural policy, the provision of finance is most important (see Chapter 3). But even the provision of finance is achieved by means of Regulations, which are one form of Community legislation. The Community is first and foremost a legislator since even the non-regulatory instruments described in section 2.4 are often embodied in some form of legislation.

It should be emphasised that policy statements by the Commission or the Parliament or the Council are only statements of that Community institution, which may not be agreed by the other institutions. Such a statement can only truly be called ‘Community policy’ when a proposal has been made by the Commission and adopted by the Council and Parliament following the procedures of the Treaty.

A Regulation is directly applicable law in the Member States and is mostly used for rather precise purposes such as financial matters and the day-to-day management of the Common Agricultural Policy. It is increasingly also being used for environmental matters. A Directive is binding as to the results to be achieved, but leaves to the Member States the choice of form and methods. It is therefore the most appropriate instrument for more general purposes particularly where some flexibility is required to accommodate existing national procedures and, for this reason, is the instrument most commonly used for environmental matters. A Decision is binding in its entirety upon those to whom it is addressed. It has been used in the environmental field in connection with international conventions and with certain procedural matters.

With the development by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) of the doctrine of ‘direct effect’ of Directives, the distinction between a Regulation and a Directive is not as clear-cut as the Treaty might suggest. (This is discussed in section 2.8).