ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION POLICY – INTEGRAL PART OF THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT CONCEPT IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

Sustainable development has become a part of global society’s modern thinking Formally speaking, sustainable development is a global political agreement that is made up of the balance between the social, economical and ecological aspects of development on all levels, from local to global. The European Union has also put forward the concept of sustainable development, which introduces a systematic solution to the question of envi- ronmental preservation as the key political paradigm of promoting sustainable consump- tion and production, environmental management in an ecologically acceptable manner, the process of informing the public about negative effects, as well as the production of ecologically acceptable products. It has also provided guidelines for its execution for all members of the European Union. The implementation of environmental legislation in the economy in relation to sustainable development represents the general principle of the new, competitive, dynamic and knowledge-based growth model of the European economy in the third millennium. In order to implement the principles of sustainable development, the European Union has numerous political and fi nancial instruments at its disposal which are supposed to contribute to reaching the goal of sustainable development. In the research the special attention will be on the efficiency of these instruments and factors that affect their efficiency. This paper examines the efficiency of these instruments and the factors that are significant in their implementation. The paper analyzes various applicative ap- proaches of the implementation of the politics of environmental preservation with the goal of the Union’s sustainable development (examples of Slovenia and Sweden are given), as well as the specifi cities of individual conceptions, their elements and domains.