Prof. Dr Sabine Pitteloud

Axes de recherche

SNF Project: Organised Business and Environmental Governance in Western Europe [1945-1995]

data.snf.ch/grants/grant/10002705

This project focuses on the role of European business interests associations (BIAs) in defining business strategies regarding increased environmental problems and regulatory pressures from 1945 to the mid-1990s. It draws primarily on the archives of peak-level business associations from Germany, Switzerland and Britain, France and Italy, named respectively the Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie (BDI), the Schweizerische Handels- und Industrieverein (SHIV), the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the Conseil National du Patronat Français (CNPF) and the Confindustria, which regrouped regional chambers of commerce and sectoral business associations as well as individual companies. Enterprises, through the exploitation of natural resources, the use of chemical components and the wastes resulting from their production, were often at the centre of political attention. New regulations would not only impose new constraints that might impact profitability, but would also discriminate between different sectors, create competitive advantages for companies mastering the cleanest technologies and create market barriers if solutions were to be implemented at the national level. Consequently, what was at stake for companies was crucial and it should not be assumed that businesses and their interest organisations unequivocally and homogeneously opposed environmental regulation. Viewed from the standpoint of peak level business associations, the project strives to provide insight on business coordination mechanisms regarding environmental issues, to investigate the extent to which competing companies and a variety of different polluting sectors were able to present their common policy position to national governments as well as cooperate within European BIAs such as the Council of European Industrial Federations (CEIF) and Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations of Europe (UNICE). In particular, the study emphasis the importance of the institutionalization of the environmental question in the 1970s, with the establishment of Environmental ministries in various European countries. Such increased politicisation prompted BIAs to establish ties with the new environmental bodies and to shift their focus from technical solutions and sectoral issues such as water, soil and air pollution, to increasingly tackle general principles of environmental policy. Moreover, focusing on five national business interest organisations with common concerns (albeit from different institutional settings) allows a comparison of the impact of such diversity on the political outcomes. For instance, some contextual and institutional particularities such as the French economic planning tradition, the German highly politicized green movements or the Swiss direct democracy resulted indifferent challenges for BIAs. This historical investigation will also assess business interest organisations’ role in providing expertise to shape the terms of the environmental debates and devise alternatives to regulation such as private governance tools. The definition of concepts of environmental governance such as the best available technology or the polluter-pay principle are indeed much controversial and subject to power struggles. In is therefore crucial to study the role BIAs, which enjoyed official consultation rights towards national governments and the European Economic Community, played in drawing the boundaries of these notions and integrating them in the regulation, or on the contrary, in proposing alternatives such as self-regulation or financial incentives. The foreseen project will therefore add to the business history literature that has recently started to tackle the role that business has played in environmental governance and will complement the history of environmental regulations and technical standards in Europe by focusing on non-state actors and opening the black box of “business interests”.