Int. J. Environment and Health, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2015 231 Copyright © 2015 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Environmental health policies in Europe: successes and failures in Switzerland, Germany and Belgium Julien Forbat School of Social Ecology, University of California Irvine, 4556 SBS Gateway Bldg, Irvine, CA 92697-7085, USA Email: jforbat@uci.edu Abstract: While European countries insist on the necessity to develop environmental health policies, mainly at the international level, a careful analysis of national policy processes, focused on national environmental health action plans (NEHAPs) and national strategies of sustainable development (NSSDs), tends to show that results obtained are particularly limited. This study investigates the reasons for this surprising ‘environmental health paradox’. Data used in this study have been obtained from interviews conducted among experts of the Swiss, German and Belgian environmental health policies and from survey results provided by the WHO Regional Office for Europe in Bonn (WHO/Europe). Findings show that major obstacles to more ambitious environmental health policies arise from their lack of political recognition at the national level, from their confinement to measures of scientific research and from the absence of any substantial system of indicators capable of correctly assessing environmental health issues and policy outcomes. Keywords: environmental health; NEHAP; Switzerland; Germany; Belgium; national health policy. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Forbat, J. (2015) ‘Environmental health policies in Europe: successes and failures in Switzerland, Germany and Belgium’, Int. J. Environment and Health, Vol. 7, No. 3, pp.231–246. Biographical notes: Julien Forbat holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies (formally in Political Science & Environmental Sciences) from the University of Geneva. He was a teaching and research assistant at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (University of Geneva) from 2008 to 2014. He is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Irvine. His main areas of interest are environmental health & sustainable development policies. In this regard, he notably studied National Environmental Health Actions Plans (NEHAPs) in European countries. He is also very interested in the relationship between the concepts of interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and cross-sectorality in terms of policy definition and implementation. This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled ‘Success and failure in European environmental health policies’ presented at the International Academic Conference, Reykjavik, 24–27 June, 2014.