Environmental Constitution for Europe – Understanding environmental sustainability as a new part of the EU’s economic- constitutional model (GREENCONS)

GREENCONS studies how the EU’s economic-constitutional could be changing to incorporate environmental sustainability as a new key constitutional objective. European integration has evolved through a peculiar economic-constitutional framework that has guided the main economic and political actors – governments, companies and consumers – in their mutually beneficial search for prosperity. The framework works through a set legal rules and constitutional principles that address issues such as free movements, competition and state aid and that are ultimately defined by the EU Court rather than political actors. However, these rules have given limited, arguably insufficient, weight on environmental sustainability, although environmental policy has always been transversal to competences exerted from the EU. The political will for addressing environmental sustainability has been clear of late within several domains: the internal market (Taxonomy Regulation), fiscal policy (funds allocated through the RRF) and the new monetary policy strategy. This evolution forms the GREENCONS starting premise, namely how these changes should be seen from the perspective of the EU’s economic-constitutional framework: punctual political reactions or ongoing structural reassessments of EU’s constitutional principles. GREENCONS is a multidisciplinary research project that analyses how environmental sustainability as a broad policy objective has affected the EU’s economic-constitutional framework. Its methodology combines theoretical research and doctrinal analysis of EU legal and policy actions as well as structured interviews with relevant institutional actors. It thus launches an innovative economic-constitutional search for coherence and functional systematicity within Treaty provisions, legal practice and institutional actions. The positive goal of GREENCONS is to understand how environmental sustainability objective forces changes in the EU economic-constitutional model. For that, the project aims to determine the economic, legal, and environmental rationales behind measures adopted in the three core areas of economic integration: internal market, monetary policy and fiscal policy. Hence, it analyses how environmental concerns could co-exist in the same framework with established economic and legal rationalities. Normatively, GREENCONS explores the preconditions for a new European Environmental Constitution.