Geert Dancet, a European Commission official since 1986, is not a chemist by training. But being the head of the first pan-EU chemicals agency demands finding the right political chemistry from some volatile and (often) incompatible elements – the EU institutions, the chemicals industry and environmentalists.
Ask anyone about the Belgian's job and the word “challenging” soon crops up in the conversation. Set up last year, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) has to oversee implementation of REACH – the registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemical substances regulation, a legislative behemoth that was five years in the making and the cause of sulphurous argument between greens and industry. Less than a year ago, he arrived at the Helsinki headquarters with just one other colleague. Now the agency has 150 staff and will triple in size by the end of 2010.
As well as managing a fast-growing office, there are plenty of other demands, notably developing the agency's software and making industry aware of the obligations imposed by REACH in time for this year's registration deadlines.
But the biggest test may be political. Ethel Forsberg, director-general of the Swedish Chemicals Agency (Kemi) and the Swedish member of the ECHA's management board, describes the job as a balancing act. She says that the 27-strong board can be “pulling in different directions sometimes”. At the same time, she says, “the Commission is pulling in a different direction”.
Given the gulf between the views of green non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and industry, it was not surprising that Dancet's appointment did not please everyone. Industry was satisfied. He is “one of the very few who has a deep understanding of the complexities of REACH”, says Charles Laroche at Unilever. But NGOs and some MEPs were unhappy about the appointment, mostly because they disliked the Commission process that restricted the final choice to just two names: Dancet and a UK diplomat who was not a chemicals specialist. NGOs worried that he was too close to the chemicals industry – he has spent much of his career at the Commission working on policies relating to the competitiveness of industry.
Accusations of being too close to industry seem to sting him, as a misreading of his whole career. He says he has spent his professional life “correcting misbehaviour or abuse or other elements that may disturb free competition”.
MEPs fretted that he did not have enough distance from the Commission.
But at a hearing in the European Parliament last November, Dancet convinced MEPs that he would not be a creature of the Commission.
He sees the advantages of his 20 years inside the institution: he knows whom to talk to in Brussels.
Since the Parliament hearing, he has demonstrated some independence. For Chris Davies, a UK Liberal Democrat (ALDE) MEP, there is “no reason to assume that he will bow to pressure from the European Commission for certain policy positions, or that he would be biased more towards immediate industry concerns than long-term environmental concerns”.
NGOs say they will judge him on his actions. But he will be watched very closely. “Mr Dancet is still on probation,” warns Caroline Jackson, a UK centre-right (EPP-ED) MEP. Former colleagues dismiss such fears. Andrew Fasey, a former member of the Commission's REACH unit, which Dancet headed from 2004, recalls him being a calm presence in a “frenetic” office, who “kept his cool even when others were losing theirs”. He did “a very good job of making sure we were able to hold our own in negotiations”, says Fasey. Others remark on his shrewdness. “He listens to what people say, but also to what is not said,” says Forsberg. Dancet is “straightforward and easy to deal with” concludes John Roberts, the UK member of the management board.
Dancet trained as an economist. During a short academic career, he was part of a group of intellectuals that in the early 1980s challenged the neo-liberal consensus then gaining force in UK and America, rejecting the view that society was irrelevant and the state should disappear. “Economics cannot be dissociated from sociology and the view of the society,” he says.
Dancet says it had always been his “dream” to work for the European Commission. Now he has had to leave the Commission and relocate his family to Finland. But he says he is enjoying his adopted country. “The chemicals agency is extremely lucky to start in a country like Finland”, he says. In his spare time – a rare commodity these days – he likes running, cycling and exploring the Finnish countryside. He enjoys travelling and has visited Latin America, North America and Asia.
He is also learning Finnish, which he says is “extremely difficult” compared to the French, Dutch, English, German and Spanish that he already speaks. He knew some Finnish from a two-year stint for the UN Industrial Development Organisation in Colombia in the 1980s, when he and his wife were friends with a Finnish-Colombian couple, giving him an early interest in umlauted vowels.
For two years he worked in Bogotá to develop the Colombian leather industry, and recalls how insecure the country was. “Many people were attacked in the street. You could very easily end up in a police station and be taken prisoner,” he says. Extra vigilance was needed after the birth of his first child, as children were regular kidnap victims. “Despite all that we enjoyed it very much because we were able to travel,” he says. “I had a very interesting experience then. If you do well in a country like that you can survive in any country in the world.” Even at the European Chemicals Agency.
