The European Green Capital Award - Towards a sustainable Europe?

Sammanfattning: Today a grand majority (around 80%) of the European citizens live in cities or towns. Europe is more urbanised than ever. Contemporaneously, climate change and global warming is an increasing threat worldwide. In 2006, the European Commission of the European Union (EU) therefore launched the idea of implementing the yearly European Green Capital (EGC) award. The aim was (and still is) to create role models by promoting cities that constantly take strong actions for the environment and thereby inspire other cities to make green choices too. In February 2009 the first two EGC winners were announced: Stockholm (Sweden) 2010 and Hamburg (Germany) 2011. The question is whether an award of this kind is the right method for the EU to deal with environment issues. If not, the EU should invest its resources elsewhere. This thesis aims at evaluating the EGC by looking closer at Stockholm as the EGC winner of 2010 and by analysing the impacts the EGC title has on Sweden’s EU Presidency the second half of 2009. The ecological modernisation theory reconciles economic growth and environmental protection, and provides several relevant features and aspects to this thesis regarding sustainable development, voluntary approaches and environmental policy-making. By applying the theory on the EGC many things such as the underlying visions and methods of the award can be explained and analysed. The conclusion of the thesis is that the EGC in some respects is leading to a greener and more sustainable Europe or at least has the potential to do so.