Green Urbanism as an element of the EU environmental policy

The new wave in the environmental policymaking took place in 1997 when turbulent years of the European restructuring stayed behind. Maastricht Treaty was finally and fully in force, measures, policies and bureaucratic rearrangements proposed by it were put in place. Following this tendency, East Germany and its production were slowly reviving and its Western part was once again oriented towards easing the pressures posed by climate change and focusing on the problems of sustainability and peoples' health that were especially important as Germany was one of the main environmental contributors and agenda setters in previous years. Moreover, apart from the Europewide and nationwide changes that occurred, majorreorientation also happened on the local level that became the center stage for action. Social determinants of health and sustainable development plans that had to be rolled out in urban areas authorized for sectoral advancements and made local governments primarily responsible for the mitigation of climate related problems. This also gave way to a variety of interest groups to participate in decision-making and made bureaucracies more careful in implementation of the needs of local dwellers and local businesses. As a result, at the turn of a new century the European Union has adopted its Sustainable Development Strategy (EU SDS) that established local, national and common (EU) target goals that had to be met by the year 2020 and were supposed to make the world a better place to live in.

1.2 EU Sustainable Development Strategy 2000 - 2020

By the start of the XXI century, levels of pollution and environmental degradation were significantly curtailed but the overall levels and types of the development that, however, were far from being called sustainable. The majority of cities around Europe still struggled to meet their economic and social goals and objectives. A number of crises that happened at that time have hit hard those states that were still catching up with the leading ones, undermined their efforts to lower unemployment rates and to provide coherent and prosperous social welfare, making them constantly postponing and lowering pollution leveltargets and, as a result, reshapingtheir understanding of capitalism. Hodson & Marvin (2017), for example, argue that at the beginning of the 2000s capitalism started to be majorly seen as a source for achieving sustainability in urban areas rather than an idea that undermined it, as it was understood before, possibly, due to the popularity of the Marxist ideology throughout the XX century. This new perception claimed that rising levels of economic growth is the only possible solution to accumulate resources. That, in turn,will help to manage urban sustainability and to invent technologies that will allow to restructure urban economies and urban spaces to meet peoples' social needs instead of national interests of wealth production.

Hence, the adoption of theSDS in 2001 as one of the elements of European Union's environmental policy has broadened the specter of climate threats and possible common and individual solutions. It claimed that a successful transition towards sustainability is only possible with the widespread participation of individuals, businesses and local governments and their understanding that the responsibility for reaching better future is evenly distributed and shared by all of them and requires them to engage in a constant dialogue with each other (EU Commission Report, 2001). The threats that were acknowledged in the document as crucial ranged from global ones, such as climate change itself,diseases, food safety, loss of bio-diversity and degradation of soil that could be used for agricultural needs, to the ones that varied from country to country, and sometimes even between cities within one state, and could be tackled individually. The latter one included poverty, ageing of the population, uncontrollable migration flows, waste management and development of recycling technologies, and transport infrastructure that posed such threats as additional greenhouse gas emissions, noise pollution and rise in stress levels among working populations.

D'Onofrio &Trusiani (2018) emphasize that while the idea that health and urban planning are interconnected and have to be dealt with together has appeared in the late 1980s - early 1990s, it was only in Phase III (1997-2003) and Phase IV (2003-2007) of the WHO Healthy Cities Project that Healthy Urban Planning (HUP) became a self-sufficient policy and target and broadened the area of sustainable development concern. For instance, a lot of effort was predicted to be put into incorporation of healthy lifestyles and everyday outdoor activities as essential parts of urban dwelling and, thus, demanded to provide people with a variety of green areas that will be sport and leisure friendly. Redevelopment of old and abandoned industrial blocs, that became nurseries and hotbeds for crime activities and undermined safety and security levels in the neighborhoods, also became burning issues. This was especially concerning the fact that after a period of almost uncontrollable urban sprawl in 1990s these areas, that used to be located on cities peripheries, now were close to city centers and, hence, to tourists and business centers. Another distinctive feature of such deprived areas, as it was officially stated in Leipzig Charter (2007) even though it became apparent several years earlier, was the outdatedness of housing located there, poor transport infrastructure, low employment rates and generally low level of social welfare that often did not correspond with the goals that were set by local governments and, hence, demanded the implementation of far-reaching and rapid actions.

However, truly profound and all-level changes, that also understood new goals and needs of HUP and sustainable development, took place in 2006 when the European Union reviewed and renewed its SDS. Newly elaborated agenda has argued that the EU has done a lot in creating healthy and sustainable environments in its cities and has quite successfully overcome some issues, i.e. those that concerned public health, but was still in need to do more and to be engaged in green urban planning more actively. For instance, as Barton & Grant (2011) conclude, issues that related to clean water and air supply became less important for localities and citizens in the XXI century as the majority of urban areas have successfully overcome them and established high and globally recognized standards, while the provision of a sufficient green common space infrastructure, for example, was still to be dealt with. Furthermore, despite the failure of the Kyoto Protocol that, arguably, was already clear in early 2000s, countries in Europe still focused on the targets that were set by the Agreement and were very consistent with meeting the objectives set for the Union in full and, if necessary, in a unilateral manner. Especially eye-catching, in this regard, was a newly proposed idea that simple renovations of already existing environments is not enough to make a society prosper, as urban sustainability and green and healthy cities are, in the first place, dependent on people who live in such areas. Hence, the EU should focus on establishing sustainable communities, rather than sustainable enclaves, and educate people to make them responsible consumers and energy-efficient users (Council of EU Report, 2006).

In the years that followed the link between the quality of life and quality of the environment that surrounded the city became the main explanation for the level of prosperity, health and happiness of citizens. Yet, when asked to give an explanation for individually important features of the quality of life, the majority of the respondents, as was found by EEA Report (2009), answered that income, access to public services and levels of employment were the primary concerns. The vast majority of urban dwellers, even those who already lived in high-income cities with good infrastructure and unlimited access to green areas, continued to be unsatisfied with their economic well-being and generally presupposed that the provision of healthy environments was granted by local governments who collected taxes and redistributed them to meet social and ecology related needs. However, the notion that further liberalization of economy and capital accumulation were perceived as the only two solutions that wouldbe able to lift the less privileged out of poverty, establish social equality and enhance levels of physical and mental well-being could be explained by the economic turbulence and post-shock of the 2008 World Economic Crisis when environmental concerns became truly less important in everyday life management.

By the 2010, after all, the EU was back on track with ecosystem friendly agenda, once again referencing to green urbanism and sustainability of cities as important elements of the Union's environmental policy. Newly set goals were far-reaching and were supposed to penetrate all areas of social and economic welfare of urban dwellers but did not demand that policies should be carried out immediately.Instead a 10-year period was given for implementation and proposing gradual shifts in all spheres of national and local statehood - this program came to be known as Europe 2020 Strategy. The main features of the proposed plan were sustainable growth (making economy green and at the same time competitive), smart growth (developing economy that is knowledge and innovation based, on which we will focus more thoroughly in chapter 3) and an inclusive growth that can be reformulated as an establishment of economic stability that provides high-employment rates in all sectors and social cohesion (EU Commission Report, 2010). Out of the three mentioned above, the smart growth is, probably, the most interesting one as it deals with social development and education of people, instead of the strictly economic characteristics as the other two. Caragliu et al. (2011) claims that such type of growth is dependent on the presence of a skilled labor force and a creative class in a society that form a basis for the implementation of the bottom-up approach in the development and regeneration of urban infrastructure. This class, hence, is supposed to be represented by professional urban planners, designers and architects,environmental scientists, business elites and leaders of various non-governmental organizations (NGOs), local bureaucracies and general publics.All these interest groups are supposed to work together and to have access to, and sometimes even direct influence on, national governments and have, what Potjer&Hajer (2017) called, “a seat at the table” of the European Union's legislative bodies responsible for environmental policymaking.

Changes on the common EU level, by the turn of the 2^nd decade of the 2000s, on the other hand, became less profound. As a separate actor on a world arena, the European Union has focused on the global promotion of environmental policies and offered its help and monetary compensations to less developed states around the globe to allow them to transition towards sustainability smoothly and to keep their pollution levels relatively low, in order not to worsen climate. After all, the conflict between core and peripheral states, on the ability of the latter ones to industrialize and reach at least comparative levels of production and monetary capitalization as the former ones had, became evident already in the second half of the XX century and since then has not significantly moved from the dead point. Moreover, clashes were rising anew every time the industrialized economies introduced new urban sustainability indicators that continually assessed social, economic and legislative performance within particular states. This, in turn, was usually leaving weaker ones in an unfavorable positions, that later on affected the likelihood of conducting agreements with foreign companies and, hence, questioned the possibility to produce more places for people to work at and to increase social welfare of citizens (EU Commission Report, 2015).

The Union's and world's reorientation towards low-carbon economy, that initially was supposed to be fully achieved by 2020, not only worsened relations with less developed even further but also produced a lot of disagreements within the Community itself. One of the points of the zero-emission economy was a need to engage in a profound renovation of the housing sector in urban areas in order to improve their energy performance, as the existing building stock was responsible for nearly 40% from the total CO₂ pollution produced by the EU (D'Agostino et al., 2017). The problem was especially tangible in European historical capitals, for instance in Paris, Berlin, London, Copenhagen and Amsterdam, the city centers of which were primarily build up with buildings that were several decades and sometimes even several centuries old. The new program, however, demanded that to meet individual local and common national targets of pollution decrease, these stocks had to be renovated inside and outside, that in some cases required that 50-60% of a dwelling had to be modernized to meet new standards. The amount of work and investments that, thus, had to be into put into practice and accumulated were so big that even the most determined and environmentally active members of the EU28 had to “ask for an extension”. This was especially true for local and state governments that were going through some hard times and had to deal with new waves of unemployment, market price rise, newly widened gap between social classes, and street protests. As a result, decarbonization of European economies and urban areas was rescheduled, with new objectives to be reached by the year 2050.

1.3 Low Carbon Economy by 2050

The transition towards low-carbon economy has already been decided by the European Union in 2011, when irrespective of all the actions that states have been taking for years, greenhouse gas emissions and Earth's temperature, following from a global warming produced by atmospheric contamination, have not significantly fallen. Cities of the EU were able to green themselves substantially and the majority of local dwellers have successfully accustomed to the usage of energy-efficient modes of transportation and adopted sport habits, such as going for shopping and to work on bicycles. Yet, a significant amount of the infrastructure that surrounded people was still energetically incompetent and by 2010, as Figure 3 shows, Union's total domestic pollution has only decreased by 12%, compared to the 1990 level.

Fig. 3: EU greenhouse gas emissions towards an 80% domestic reduction (100% = 1990). Source: EU Commission Report (2011).

An ambitious target that the EU has set itself to reach by 2050, that is curtailing its pollution and decarbonizing economy by 80% in 60 years, has become threatened (EU Commission Report, 2011). One of the possible reasons for this was a need to preserve high market competitiveness of the goods produced on the European market so that the revenues that national economies receive, and then invest into cities to make them greener and more sustainable, would have not fallen significantly. Moreover, a significant work would have to be taken in the power sector, replacing the burning of fossil fuels, and subsequently a dependence on the oil and natural gas supply, with renewable energy sources. This would also imply making nations more dependent on the solar and wind energy, while at the same time focusing on a more careful management of the hydroelectric power stations, the installation of which tend to destroy valuable ecosystems and disrupt natural water flow.

Additionally, as it can be traced in Figure 3, transport and agriculture sectors of economy in European urban areas and their neighborhoodsare likely to be the ones where changes will take place only very gradually and slowly. The reason for this, on the one hand, is that the number of cars that are equipped with electric engines as well as an amount of parking spaces where these machines can be recharged continues to be substantially low throughout the EU. The agricultural sector, on the other hand, needs to restore significant areas of grass, wet and peat lands and forest areas in order to rebalance the environment and enhance general health conditions which, as common sense suggests, cannot be done on short notice.

However, Knopf et al. (2013) argues that the European Union is very likely to meet its common and individual national and local targets, set out in the EU Commission Low-Carbon Strategy by 2050, in the reduction of greenhouse gas contamination and keeping the rise of global average temperature at or even below 2C for the years to come. The majority of the objectives that were set, the authors continue, can quite possibly be met by 2030 already, even if individual states, especially those located in the Eastern and Southern parts, will stay behind and inactive in the implementation of some policies. Nevertheless, from the middle of 2030s and onwards to 2050 decarbonization of economy will, presumably, demand further reorientation towards even stricter and tighter policies and more investment, in order to be able to meet its 2050 goals, otherwise exceeding the proposed levels and ruining global environment once again.

On the contrary, European environmental activists claim that the actions that the Community and cities have already been taking and the ones that they have set for themselves for the future are ineffective and meaningless, if we project them at the current world situation. As a result, the 80% reduction in domestic pollution should become a reality not in 2050 but in 2030, with substantial fossil fuel abolition to be implemented as early as possible and with total redevelopment of industrial areas and refurbishment of housing infrastructure to minimize emissions that they produced on the core. From this point of view, the actions that the European bureaucrats engage in and the solutions that they suggest lack coherence and are majorly dependent on strong lobbyism of transnational corporations (TNCs) and global exploitative trade links that are focused on short-term revenues. This, thus, makes the ability of general publics to participate in environmental decision-making and agenda setting and the exercise of the bottom-up approach, of which the EU was especially proud of, trivial.

All of this, as a result, makes questions of the levels that are available for the policy implementation on ecology related issues a key concern of urban sustainability. The European Union, as it has been outlined before in this paper, has not only focused on the adoption of environmentally friendly initiatives itself, but also on the value promotion within its regional, local, state and non-state levels, as well as on the global level. As a result, becoming one of the most active players on world arena, focused on the mitigation of climate change and disturbances that are related to it.

2. EU levels of policy implementation on matters of ecology

2.1 Global and Common European values promotion level

Pretty much since the rise of environmental concerns inthe 1970s, the European Union became one of the key policy promoters on the global arena. It has engaged in a close examination of the interconnectivity between universally produced pollution and its effects on urban areas and vice versa, as well as on the types of various classes of emission and the ways that they have affected sustainability and health of city dwellers. One aspect of such a profound worldwide cooperation and value promotion, as it was outlined in the previous chapter, was a solid collaboration between the EU and various international organizations, for example, such as the World Health Organization and the United Nations. This became possible becauseEuropean states were trusted enough to conduct comprehensive policy execution and to establish new environmentally friendly targets for economic development. Moreover, countries of the Union, being one of the most developed ones in the world, continued to show patterns of steady growth and industrial prosperity, while at the same time becoming more and more socially oriented both de jure and de facto. The ability of them to successfully revive their economies without compromising citizens' demands for a rise in a social welfare and focusing on a maintenance of the mental and physical well-being of individuals, made the EU one of the most trustworthy promoters and executors of global ecology related strategies.

Collier(1997) argues that the European Union has been massively engagingin all-inclusive environmental affairsthrough the establishment ofambitious emission reduction plans, by running local and global campaigns to enhance levels of public awareness and rising a popularity of renewable energy sources usage.This became possible since the conclusion of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiroin 1992 where the Community,as a fully-fledged and an independent, from its Member states, participant of international relations,was given a separate seat. Another outcome of the Rio Summit, as Kern &Bulkeley (2009) suggest, was an introduction of several transnational municipal networks one of which - Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) - focused on the reduction of greenhouse gas pollution in urban areas around the world. Furthermore, the network promoted an exchange of expertise and knowledge using global horizontal upscaling, which we defined earlier in this thesis, and created diplomatic preconditions that allowed this program to have access to and influence on national and sometimes even international governments and their environmental policymaking.

Thus, the orientation of the EU climatic agenda hastransformed to ensure international and all-encompassing long-term prosperity and focused on the adoption of development practices.These practices were needed to support attempts of other states, especially those primarily located in the South, to modernize in a sustainable format and by sustainable meansin order to minimize anenvironmental damage that their industrialization might have caused. Additionally, Europe has legislatively bounded its relationships with other states by the rules of environmental cooperation. For example, such documents as Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PAC) between EU and Russia, Central Asia Indicative Program and Euro-Mediterranean Partnership are a few to name protocols that have climate change concerns as a part of official documents which, first and furthermost, govern political, economic and market relations between signatories (Knill&Tosun, 2009).

Moreover, on the global scale the European Union was also committed to interfere and reshape trade relationships and market liberalization patterns.These become especially demanding in the latest General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the first World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings and had a potential to undermine already achieved levels of urban sustainability development worldwide. On the one hand, the despair here, as Kelemen (2010) demonstrates, was that the imposition of strict market rules and inflexible standards could have, probably, createda precondition for organization's member states, especially for those who were recently accepted, to engage in the `race-to-the-bottom'. This dangerous tendency was believed to preserve competitiveness, attract more foreign direct investment (FDI) and rise levels of intrastate production, hence, making states abolish environmentally friendly policies and nullify what has already been achieved in terms of climate change mitigation. For the branch of the developed states who in their majority wished to further uphold to environmental agenda and to oppose the fraud logic of `economic competitiveness above all means', new rules, on the other hand, produced a threat that their actions might be regarded as the WTO-banned non-tariff barriers, that are aiming at preventing the appearance of goods, produced by weaker states, on the European and international markets.

On the intra-Union level European states and its legislative bodies have adopted even more profound and active position than on the global scale. The environmental agenda of the EU has become one of the main focuses of its founding acts in the post-1980s era, Council and Commission reports and even went as far as to make the European Court of Justice (ECJ) a key environmental law and climate related disputes guardian. One of the possible explanations here is an endorsement of an extremely active stance by some of the European states, for example, as was with a carbon/energy tax popularized by Germany in the 1990s, and a vast number of European cities whose primary concern lied with relocation of industrial areas outside of urban peripheries and their redevelopment to meet social demands of local dwellers.

Furthermore, the adoption of the EU Sustainable Development Strategy, of which we talked in chapter 1, was another breakthrough in the promotion of environmental values on the common European arena. It emphasized that sustainability can only be achieved by the means of multi-level cooperation where climate mitigation agenda is not only proposed by major bureaucratic bodies of the European Union and then implemented by lower branches in a top-down format per se. This is also true other way around when, instead of traditional command-and-control regulation, `context-oriented' instruments were introduced as means to formulate new environmental policy of the EU (Holzinger et al., 2006). These instruments effectively corresponded with global rules of oil spills regulation and accidental water, air and soil contamination issues and unveiled a number of new economic mechanisms, which were used differently depending on the current economic situation within a particular country. Additionally, these tools were supposed to guarantee a fair redistribution of ecology friendly resources among Member states as well as to provide these resources in a targeted format. Moreover, these instruments have also focused on a supply of healthy and green environments in cities, making Green Urbanism one of the key elements of the European environmental agenda, and concentrated on the elimination of dangerous life-style dynamics, such as physical inactivity, obesity and mental unrest. All these problems were produced by the overwhelming amount of stress related surroundings, uncontrollable urban sprawland a high-rise residential development that disrupted natural ecosystems of European states and created extensive agglomerations - a tendency that was not so massively experienced before 1990s - 2000s by the EU Member states. As a result, for many years the center stage of the Europe-wide promotion of environmentally friendly activities was taken by the “leader-laggard” relationship between economically strong and, thus, green-oriented countries and those who have not yet managed to benefit from economic globalization and market liberalization in full.The latter ones, hence, wished to continue to further accumulate material resources to secure themselves and their populations from turmoil that, as it was perceived, will necessarily happen as soon as they start to rebuild their economies to become energy-efficient and sustainable. As a result, countries such as Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Norway etc., being one of the most active on the board of the European Commission, European Parliament and in the Council of the European Union, often overfulfilled their pollution elimination targetsin order to allow the rest to industrialize and contaminate on existing levels, at the same time preserving that EU-set emission levels will not rise, creating a tendency of which we will talk more in the next section of this chapter.

2.2 Regional and State specific level

Regional development of environmental policies throughout the European Union has become strictly differentiated since the beginning of the 1990s and was represented by three distinctive agenda proposals and development trajectories. First of all, post-communist Eastern states with varying levels of economic development and generally low climatic concerns, secondly, highly industrialized and environmentally oriented countries of Europe's North and West. And, finally,Southern European states with their heavy dependency on agriculture.

The activity on the matters of ecology in the first case scenario, arguably, was a result of the European Union enlargement that was almost unstoppable since the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR/SU). This process simultaneously opened a lot of markets and development possibilities and demanded from projected Member states to adapt its legislature and adopt its policies to the ones of the Union. Such political reorganization was supposed to go as far as to completely reinvent not only liberal economy and democratic statehood in states that for 50 years were controlled by communist ideology but also to completely reconstruct societies. This, for example, presupposed making them inculcate individual values and educating people that blind use of natural resources and constantly rising levels of production will not necessarily lead them to prosperous future and is likely to provide their descendants with a lot of problems, so serious as an extinction. Thus, in order for this transition to happen smoothly, initial Members engaged in a deep cooperation and thorough collaboration with Eastern European national and local governments where an issue of sustainable development and promotion of values of Green Urbanism have become one of the spotlights.

In a more developed and Europeanized Western and Northern Europe, as Jordan &Lenschow (2000) emphasize, major changes took place with the reestablishment of the EU's environmental policy integration (EPI). EPI demanded an all-encompassing modernization of settled European political systems in order to allow more representation for climate oriented agencies on all levels of government and to provide lobby groups with direct access to policymaking and agenda setting bodies, so that they can have more influence on the legislature processes that concern European and urban ecology. By playing a role of major sustainability and climate change promoters, leading Member states focused on the introduction of environmental needs as a key source for development in spheres of heavy and light industry, personal vehicles and also tourism that by the beginning of the XXI century has accelerated significantly. The majority of the EU capital cities have become places of attraction for power and money with their economies reorienting towards individual-specific demands that had an overwhelming influence over states' and regions' policymaking and moved industrial concerns, which were not related to the progress in environmentally friendly technologies, to the place of second preference.

The third ecology-economy development scenario was taking place in the Southern Europe where the majority of states were significantly closer to the developed ones in their political motives and social construct, while their economies have differentiated substantially. Countries such as Spain, Italy and Portugal, as the most striking examples, were, and up until nowadays continue to be, dependent on their agricultural sector of economy a lot. Hence, the levels of production within these countries is so high that it allows them to cover their own and those of their neighbors needs and to massively export abroad. This, in turn, results in the unwillingness of agricultural giants to install more control over ways of food farming and incorporate a broad range of environmentally friendly technologies that are believed to lower levels of manufacturing. Thus, the production of foodstuffs, from seeding to cultivation, using various types of fertilizers, to collection, processing and redistribution of products has for decades been claimed to be one of the most polluting and sometimes even dangerous for consumers' health, as was with an introduction of genetically modified organisms (GMO), but at the same time one of the most profitableindustries in the world. Regularity of food supply and a variety of options to choose from has also become one of the milestones to measure the level of development and prosperity of a specific state and has become especially important due to the rapid rise of European population, thanks to migration flows the final destination of which are capital or other big cities of EU.As a result, this position, adopted by countries in the European South, led to an unsatisfactory tendencythat isrepresented by Figure 3. The graph estimate shows that non-CO₂greenhouse gas emissions, related to the agricultural sector of European regional economy, in 60 years are likely to be curtailed only by 5-6% and are projected to represent almost a third of all European Union's emissions by 2050. Thus, making a balance between two evils - food security/food shortages and climate change - the key concern of international and local environmental policymaking as well as an ideational battle between EU member states (EU Commission Report, 2011).

On the other hand, the state specific policy implementation level and an ability of national agenda to influence regional and EU-wide environmental protocol rotates around, what Jordan et al. (1999) calls, a debate between intergovernmentalists and pluralists. In particular, their disagreement is about what comes first: individual state's influence over the European Union or commonly set top-down strategies that bind national legislature and bureaucratic maneuver. Common sense here seems to dictate that in the past 20-25 years, countries of the EU became more independent in proposing and undertaking their ecology related actions on a separate basis and have engaged in subsidiarity a lot by relocating assets, such as tax collection,local budget redistributionand environmental agenda setting, to the most immediate level. Moreover, the majority of states, especially those of Western Europe, have also reoriented their developmental concerns towards an establishment of the knowledge-based economies, on which we will precisely focus in the next chapter, and on the promotion of ecology friendly measures and sustainable development.

Hence, the outstanding breakthrough in the state specific and statewide promotion of green urban development has taken place at the Lisbon Summit in 2000 when the Open Method for Coordination (OMC) was introduced. The OMC is usually referred to as a `soft law' of the European Union that aims to restructure policy area collaboration between Member states and reduce gaps between them without necessarily introducing binding EU legislature and obliging states to adopt policies that in its initial format might discourage economic development of weaker ones in favor of common environmental deterioration reduction (Potjer&Hajer, 2017). Additionally, the Method gives states and national governments a significant level of autonomy in strategy making and further scheme administration in a size, way and format that is deemed acceptable by a country. It also takes into consideration state's current level of economic development, population needs, such as employment, equality and mental and social wellbeing, and the amount of free assets that the government possesses and is able to invest into ecological programs.

The reason for such a profound and all-encompassing climate friendly stance and subsequent policy and purpose reorientation, as van Winden et al. (2007) argues,was the rapid development of Asian economies - “the Asian miracle” - that have industrially surpassed Europe by the turn of the millennium. Their rapid modernization took placenot only in goods manufacturing but also in the provision of services, including the provision of banking maintenance, where Western states were unconditional leaders in the previous years. The amount of available workforce and peoples' working capacity have also played a role here and added fuel to the fire as European economies were, arguably, completely incapable of keeping up with the pace of industrial development in China, India and Four Asian Tigers (Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) who by the start of the XXI century have become high-income and prosperous states. As a result, this tendency did not leave many options to the EU in general and to its individual members, making them to regenerate themselves and to give more concern towards the mitigation of issues related to climate change, the most urgent and demanding of which were global warming and management of urban health on a state scale.

The only way to counterbalance environmental degradation produced by economic advancements in Asian states, as EU Member states perceived it, was possible through an adoption of an extremely active stance in the promotion of sustainability values. This also included raising global awareness, educating populations and other states' governmentson the matters of climate change and, likewise, a close and strict supervision on the implementation of pollution reduction targets set by various IOs and international protocols. Furthermore, a center stage in this “game” was taken by European ecologists and environmental scientists who closely collaborated with international tech companies and national governments on the development of various ecology friendly machinery, electronics and materials that are able to substantially increase levels of social and economic wellbeing of people who live in cities and around the world. These machines, at the same time, were supposed tohelp to mitigate climate related disturbances which were produced by decades of industrialization and continue to disrupt green growth and undermine peoples' health.

The last stage of European environmental policy execution, of which we will talk in the next section of this chapter, is defined by further subsidiarity of task implementation to the smallest available scale - local or city specific level with local municipalities and general public becoming key actors. Moreover, the most recent tendency in setting green urban agendas and introducing sustainable development as a way to prosperity and healthy life is an introduction of non-state players. These participants are becoming more and more active on the climate arena and often have direct access and strong influence both on local dwellers and local rulers.

2.3.Local and Non-State level

Cities of the European Union have become the main field for Green Urbanism promotion and sustainable development implementation just several decades ago but the activities that they have engaged into turned out to be one of the most successful measures directed at climate change mitigation and human ecology preservation. Mega (1996) argues that particular achievements of such activities were an introduction of decentralization ideas, local public empowerment and control devolution which were able to drag into a spotlight public areas regeneration and control of urban sprawl. Moreover, the author continues, housing and other infrastructure renovation were used as means to enhance levels of mental and physiological health among city residents, while innovative experimentation in these areas often took a form of a discussion between different interest groups and, by virtue of upscaling and knowledge sharing,was able to produce quite extensive results.

Local level of policy implementation on matters of ecology has, thus, become the most dynamic, enthusiastic and independent actor within the whole EU. The reason for this was a massive economic and social development that happened in cities and around them that often produced self-sufficient and effective urban economies and environments.They, in turn, were able to maintain themselves without management or investments coming from central governments. This tendency was firstly exercised only among big European citieswho, due to their international and national positions, were able to maintain and develop themselves independently from other actors and national governments indecision. Metropoles were later on joined by a variety of middle size and small urban areas that were also suffering from environmental degradation produced by centuries of industrialization. Barcelona and Milan and their satellite towns, for example,engaged in implementation and evolution of urban environmental legislature despite the fact that Spanish and Italian central authorities were both reluctant andhesitant in giving ecological matters a prerogative over economic build up even though by the start of the XXI century it was obvious that cities were not the only ones affected by climate change the most but also those who contributed to it the most.

By the year 2000, an average city of the EUof one million dwellers used approximately 320 000 tons of water, 11 500 tons of fossil fuels and other non-renewable energy sources and 2000 tons of food per day(Price & Dube, 1999). Moreover, the heavy dependence of European societies on urban areas as main producers and consumers of goods, places for employment and main investmentmanufacturers has produced additional problems for local and national governments as it was obvious thatif cities do not significantly restrain their appetites in the following years, global climate change degradation might first become uncontrollable and then completely irreversible. Thus, the vast majority of European metropoles have profoundly engaged in the implementation of various environmentally friendly policies, such as rising quality of air and water supply, redevelopment of abandoned industrial areas and road infrastructure to curtail noise and dirt pollution. At the same time,they focused on making cities a comfortable place to live in as urbanization continued to spread through the European continent and dragged more and more people in search for better living conditions, work and income.

These developments were happily met by all levels of decision-making authoritiesas it allowed them to meet commonly set EU reduction targets while easing bureaucratic control and dispersing it among various stakeholders. Moreover, such tendency contributed to producing a trustworthy system of circular supervision where national government was not the only source of environmental legislature make up and implementation. Furthermore, as Rosenzweig et al. (2011) claims, local climate change advancements have outlined the importance of integrating adaptation and mitigation strategies into the daily life activities of citizens and educating them that sustainability can only be achieved by a gradual and pragmatic management of ecological risks. This, in turn, demanded an incorporation of urban planning professionals, scientists, local and international business elites and general public into a dialogue with elected officials in order to develop policies that would be able to bring everyone's desires to the lowest common denominator and will also satisfy both EU set and global guidelines.

One of the possible explanations for putting such a deep emphasis on the cities and local governments is a highly decentralized in some aspects of nationhoodstructure of the European states, that is evident even in some unitary countries such as France. Perceptions, ideas and programs of self-government and a capability of having at least relative autonomy from the central bureaucratic bodies in agenda setting and policy implementation, especially in the sphere of ecology related legislature, have allowed Member states to engage in and establish one of the most comprehensive and far-reaching environmental policies in the world with an exceptional position given to urban areas and concepts of waste-less urban metabolism and Green Urbanism. Moreover, since late 1990s the center stage of climate change mitigation strategy was taken by the European leading cities with the rest of the superstructure building on top of it. The plan essentially strived for a profound redevelopment of local infrastructure, in order to achieve sustainability, and has rotated around a belief that integration of regional climate and ecological factors into management of the EU's urban areas, that in turn will pull up national environmental networks and afterwards will, probably, spread across the whole European Union. Some authors, for example, referred to an idea of `green belts'around old citiessuch as Vienna and London imposition of which severely affected every climate change mitigation policy making sector (Beatley, 2012).

However, further into the XXI century it was understood that simple allocation of environmental policy execution to the local governments is not enough. The majority of city managers, as it was observed, lacked expertise and experience, while actions proposed by environmental scientists, activists and professional planners were becoming increasingly harder to implement and were demanding more and more concessions to be made by every executive and legislative branch of the European Union. Hence, urban climate politics, still majorly defined by the top-down policy making, have made a room for another level in the ecology friendly resolution sphere - the non-state action promotion standard.

Betsill&Bulkeley (2006) define two distinct types of agenda influencers that are located outside of regular multi-level governance systems- international regimes and transnational networks (TNNs). The importance of these non-state actors, as it is usually perceived by various scholars, is in theirglobal, state-wide and, most importantly, local environmental policy makingcapability and their competence to frame, promote and change the behavior and actions of countries that are subordinate to them. Their major focus, thus, is a facilitation of inter-national, inter-governmental andcross-sectoral cooperation and spread of climate change mitigation knowledge and values. At the same time making them focus on the establishment of concrete rules and policies and provide information that is necessary to conduct and exercise a specific ecology friendly agenda. Nevertheless, due to their peculiarity, international regimes and TNNs are probably one of the most important features of the European environmental strategy, as explained by the classical IR theories. The focal point of any non-state actor, after it was created and established by states who subscribed to its values, is to ensure that these signatory countries actually follow what they have agreed to, do not cheat or try to cash in at an expense of others and recognize the superiority of the regime/network over their national and local desires and, sometimes, even over national legislature.As a result, penetrating all spheres of state and policy building from global to regional level and from national to the local one.