This year, IEEP turns 50! To celebrate this extraordinary milestone, throughout 2026, we will retrace IEEP’s long history, highlight key moments in EU policymaking, and showcase our influence and impact on some of the most critical events, with the support of current and past friends, colleagues, and supporters. In this first blog, Honorary Fellow & Founding Director of IEEP London, Nigel Haigh OBE, and Executive Director of our sister organisation in Brussels, Antoine Oger, talk about the origins of IEEP and reflect on the challenges to come.

Fifty years ago, in 1976, the European Cultural Foundation created the Institute for Environmental European Policy – IEEP in Bonn, with Konrad von Moltke as its first Director. Konrad was a man of exceptional qualities [1] and quickly made three decisions. He realised that IEEP needed to define its task; it had to identify a Europe-wide target audience, and it needed a presence in at least some other countries if it was not to be seen as just a German institute.

The chosen task was “to inform and guide policymakers” and it remains to this day the DNA of the organisation as a neutral, evidence-based provider of policy insights.  Then, the problem for any European organisation in finding an audience was that, at that time, there was no European public and no European news media, while policy networks in each EU Member State are unique to them. Konrad accordingly selected parliamentarians as IEEP’s priority audience as they then had no sources of information about what was happening in other countries and were thus staggeringly ill-informed, notably on environmental policy.  He developed links with the European Parliament (EP) and identified the relevant parliamentary committees in the – at the time – 9 Member States. He got them to send him their agendas, which provided material for IEEP’s bi-monthly Bulletin “The Environment in Europe”, a flagship publication that continued for some ten years.  The Bulletin greatly empowered European Parliamentarians by showing that other countries were taking the subject seriously.

Konrad also believed strongly that the European Economic Community’s environmental policy was not just “made in Brussels” but through the interaction between the Member States, with their national preoccupations, and the Europe-wide view taken by the EEC institutions. This reinforced the argument for national presence and resulted in the opening of IEEP offices in Paris in 1978 and in London in 1980. It was at that time that Konrad asked me, Nigel Haigh, who had helped to found the European Environmental Bureau – EEB and was one of its Vice-Presidents, to write an extended essay on the impact of the EEC on UK policy. This resulted in a 1984 book, “EEC Environmental Policy and Britain”, that was the first attempt to analyse the impact in any Member State of the EEC Directives related to the environment. It was well reviewed and further established IEEP’s reputation by pointing out positive outcomes stemming from the interactions between European and national levels. It also had an impact on the European Commission in Brussels, showing that it was not sufficient for them to ensure that Directives were properly transposed into national law, but that the law was properly applied in practice. This highlighted the importance of implementation in political discussions, and IEEP began receiving contracts from the Commission to conduct comparative reports on how EEC legislation was being implemented in practice. When, in 1996, the European Commission and Parliament held a hearing on the challenges for the implementation of EC law, it was IEEP who was asked to provide the background paper [2].

The EEC’s first Action Programme on the Environment was adopted in 1973 even though the 1957 Treaty of Rome that had founded the EEC made no reference to the environment. An early concern for IEEP was thus to have environmental considerations written into the Treaty, and in particular an obligation to integrate the environment into other policy areas such as agriculture, transport, energy or fisheries. This paved the way for decades of impactful policy analysis and recommendations for the benefit of European policymakers in a wide array of topics, as the other blogs in this series aim to show.

This strategy for impact through direct interactions with a limited set of policymakers from the European Commission and Parliament yielded great results. Yet the increased influence of Brussels institutions in the daily lives of citizens up to (so far) the creation and formalisation of the European Union through the treaties of Maastricht and Lisbon profoundly transformed European policymaking and called for a strategic reflection at IEEP. This questioning was exacerbated by Brexit in 2016 and triggered existential considerations related to maintaining an organisation dedicated to EU policy research in the UK. Eventually, the decisions were made: to scale up the operations of IEEP in Brussels, closest to the EU institutions, and later a revived presence and revised focus in London; and to expand our activities beyond the production of policy analysis and recommendations to interact with a larger audience  to influence the broader debate on environmental policymaking across Europe, at the EU and national level.

As such, IEEP is using its DNA of neutrality and scientific excellence to act as a convener between various stakeholders on the European stage. Through its activities and initiatives, IEEP provides a safe space for environmental policy dialogue, which is in dire need in the current political context. We already demonstrated that, with a sound scientific basis, a common understanding for environmental policy that delivers for people, the economy and the planet can be found surprisingly easily among seemingly vastly different stakeholders. We aim to continue facilitating this dialogue during the next decades.

50 years later, here we are at the heart of Europe, remaining the only institute that specialises in European environmental issues,  playing what we believe to be a key role as a neutral, evidence-based convener of various actors and providing forward-thinking policy recommendations on critical environmental challenges, proving right Konrad von Moltke’s intuition and forging the new generation of policy experts.

NB: this blog was first published on the IEEP website, and contains minor edits for the IEEP UK audience.

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

[1] C. Weill, Petite et Grande Histoire de l’Environnement – Konrad von Moltke (1941-2005)

[2] N. Haigh, EU Environmental Policy – Its journey to centre stage (2016)