In recent decades, the European Union has developed one of the world's most stringent sets of environmental policies. These policies cover not only the traditional areas of environmental concern, such as fighting pollution and protecting natural resources, but also increasingly salient issues like GMOs and climate change, which affect day-to-day patterns of production and consumption. As with all areas of policy making within the EU, the creation of environmental policy relies on the co-operation of many political actors - EU institutions, national authorities and interest groups - all with widely differing agendas. Studying how the dynamics between these political actor's result in specific environmental policies reveals much about the wider dynamics at play in the EU as a whole.
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