Italy and the EU's environment and consumer policy. Coalition building, problem framing and informal channels of influence

Although it is considered among the ‘environmental laggard’ states of the Union, Italy proved able to perform a crucial role in the promotion of one of the basic principles of EU environmental and consumer policy, namely the precautionary principle. The Italian government was influential in promoting this principle in EU food safety policy, in particular in a 2000 Directive on genetically modified organisms. This picture is certainly not one-sided, as the weakness of the Italian government in influencing EU decision-makers in the case of the 2001 Cocoa Directive shows. The main factors that explain when Italy matters in the EU environmental and consumer policy process are the way interests are aggregated, the way the problem is framed and the types of channels exploited to affect the policy process.