The titles of academic books are often misleadingly broad relative to their content. Yet even by such conventional standards, The Coordination of the European Union is exceptional, as it deals with one type of coordination—the integration of “horizontal” objectives across administrative domains—in one policy area: the environment. The authors, both well-known specialists in this field, provide a detailed analysis of the development of environmental policy integration (EPI) in the EU and its member states since the 1970s. From this deep but narrow basis, they seek to draw broad conclusions about the “capacities of networked governance” in the EU's multilevel decision-making system. Andrew Jordan and Adriaan Schout rightly observe that horizontal coordination in pursuit of cross-sectoral objectives is a widespread feature of EU policymaking across many issue areas, from gender mainstreaming, the promotion of economic competitiveness, and territorial cohesion to development cooperation, cross-border drug crime, and counterterrorism. But they do not systematically compare the outcomes and mechanisms of horizontal coordination in any of these areas with those of EPI, thus severely circumscribing the generalizability of their findings.

The best-known mechanism for EPI in the EU is the so-called Cardiff Process, a system of iterative target setting, planning, reporting, and review initiated in 1998, whereby sectoral formations of the Council of Ministers, such as agriculture, energy, transport, and industry, were supposed to develop ongoing strategies for incorporating environmental objectives into their policymaking at both European and national levels. Five years later, assessments of the Cardiff Process by EU institutions, national governments, and academic experts were uniformly pessimistic, concluding that it had “failed to deliver fully on expectations” and had “yet to have a significant impact on sectoral policy making, let alone on improvements on the ground” (quotations from the European Commission and the European Environmental Agency, pp. 10, 20). Despite calls from the Commission for an annual “Cardiff stocktake,” references to the process have gradually faded away, while EPI has been effectively subsumed into the EU's broader Sustainable Development Strategy (launched in 2001 and substantially revised in 2006).

This sad tale might be expected to make for a very short book, but the authors seek to account for the EU's difficulties in achieving EPI by undertaking a systematic “network audit” of coordination capacities across the Union as a whole, two of its key institutions (the Commission and the Parliament), and three member states (Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands). For this purpose, they develop an elaborate analytical framework, involving a nine-level scale of coordination (drawn from the work of Les Metcalfe), which runs from completely independent policymaking at one extreme to implementing a common strategy at the other; a typology of coordination mechanisms (including formal hierarchy, bureaucratic procedures, specification of objectives, training, mission statements, and various “horizontal” devices such as teams and task forces); and a grid of the main phases of the EU policy cycle, from initiation of proposals to final enactment.

The individual chapters applying this framework are written to a common formula, and are likely to be consulted, rather than read straight through, by all but the most devoted environmental policy specialists. Among the more significant points that emerge from this analysis at the EU level are the very limited institutionalization of networks responsible for EPI (the Cardiff Process network, the network of national environmental coordinators, and the Environmental Policy Review Group), together with the organizational barriers to cross-sectoral coordination arising from the vertical segmentation of Directorate-Generals in the Commission and Committees in the Parliament. At the national level, despite changes over time in environmental policymaking processes within each of the three countries, and continuing divergences among them, none scores highly in terms of four minimum capacities identified by the authors for effective cross-sectoral coordination within the EU's multilevel system: the ability to work proactively, resolve differences as early as possible, reach decisions efficiently, and avoid administrative overload.

Given this comprehensive indictment, the solutions proposed by Jordan and Schout are surprisingly modest: Bolster the size of EU coordinating units within national environmental ministries and enhance their responsibility for EPI; charge member states with developing national EPI strategies, whose content could be benchmarked by the Commission; and use the Environmental Policy Review Group as a framework for promoting networked cooperation in the pursuit of common policy agendas among national environmental departments across the EU.

This paradoxical gap between diagnosis and remedies highlights fundamental weaknesses in the book's theoretical framework and research design. The authors present their study as a critical exploration of the capacities of new networked modes of governance in the EU, as opposed to more hierarchical forms of coordination. Their theoretical critique is directed primarily against the claim that policy networks are “self-organizing and self-steering,” which Jordan and Schout themselves acknowledge is something of a straw man in the EU governance debate, while their scale and typology of coordination mechanisms implicitly assume the superiority of hierarchical management. Yet the authors' practical proposals for improving the effectiveness of EPI in the EU all point in the direction of strengthening capacities and mechanisms for networked coordination in pursuit of common objectives through recursive review of decentralized implementation experience by European and national actors. Networked, experimentalist governance arrangements of this type are already, in fact, operating with considerable success in many fields of EU policymaking, from data privacy, energy regulation, and water management to food safety, drug authorization, internal security, and antidiscrimination rights. The extent of such innovative governance across the EU is obscured not only by this book's exclusive focus on EPI but also by its apparent presumption that network coordination capacity depends on hierarchical steering.