Ecology & Politics in Southeastern Europe: The Impact of Europeanisation on the Nature Protection System of Countries of Southeast Europe

Europeanization refers to the process of adjustment that is characteristic of the countries that wanted to enter the EU and which therefore had to adjust their policies and legal order, as well as carry out institutional corrections. The field of nature and environmental protection was not exempt from this. As far as political ecology produced any research, it was rare and primarily directed at the policy and normative level, and not at the establishment of a new institutional system (polity and politics). Such a move as regards research was made by Aleksandar Šobot in the Natura 2000 field; he carried out research on the structural and systemic conditions under which policy, normative, and institutional changes occurred. The results of his research lead to the conclusion that in a given political community political, social, and civil society structures as well as their mutual interrelations that had existed before the process of Europeanization determine the manner of their functioning, their political power, and their level of initiative. Where expert non-governmental environmental organizations had developed, they played an important role in determining the Natura 2000 area, as well as in its institutionalization, thus they were the bearers of Europeanization. However, in the areas where they were not present, civil society did not have a significant impact on the process of Europeanization, rather this process occurred vertically, in a top-down manner, with the bearers being the states and their institutions. In the case of Natura 2000 in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the process of Europeanization was carried out with the support of various actors at the forefront, and therefore in different ways this has resulted in the relativization of the theory of Europeanization in the Natura 2000 field, as the latter can no longer consider the process of Europeanization to be state-centric, but instead, it is being decisively driven by the objectives of civil society and expert organizations. Furthermore, Aleksander Šobot calls attention to the further development of Natura 2000 on the normative, institutional, and program levels in each of the abovementioned countries. 6 Aleksandar Šobot is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Business and Management Sciences, University of Novo Mesto, and an associate member of the Center for Political Theory, University of Ljubljana.