Implementing and complying with EU governance outputs

Abstract

This essay takes stock of the literature on how European Union policies are being put into practice by the member states. It first provides an overview of the historical evolution of the field. After a relatively late start in the mid-1980s, the field has meanwhile developed into one of the growth industries within EU research. The paper identifies four waves of EU implementation scholarship, each with its own theoretical, empirical and methodological focus. In the second part, the review discusses the most important theoretical, empirical and methodological lessons to be drawn from existing studies. Four conclusions emanate from the analysis of existing EU implementation research. First, the literature has focused heavily on the transposition of EU directives, while comparatively little is known about issues of enforcement and application of both directives and regulations or about member states' reactions to negative integration. Second, scholars studying the transposition of directives seem to agree that we need to address factors that influence member states' willingness and capacities to comply. The main task to be accomplished by future research is to establish under what conditions which configurations of factors prevail, especially with regard to sectoral differences. Third, more energy needs to be devoted to systematic research on the phase of practical implementation, and this research should make more use of theoretical insights from domestic implementation research as well as from management and enforcement approaches. Fourth, quantitative transposition research will have to improve the data it uses to measure the dependent variable. Scholars should explore better data sources and invest more energy in collecting their own data on transposition timing and correctness. Research on application and enforcement, on the other hand, needs to go beyond case studies and instead search for or produce data with which the practical phase of implementation can be analysed on a broader, more comparative scale.

What's the Problem? Multilevel Governance and Problem‐Solving

“…These operational understandings of problem-solving are less prominently the focus of MLG studies, but nonetheless relevant. Understanding problem-solving beyond policy adoption in MLG invites the researcher to consider the insights from the literatures on policy instrument choice, legal and practical policy implementation and enforcement (Scholten, 2017;Treib, 2014), regulatory quality (Radaelli, 2004), and policy evaluation (Pattyn, Van Voorst, Mastenbroek & Dunlop, 2018).…”

“…(Jordan 1999: 87) One example of operational problem-solving is the "customization" of EU policies by member states, where the latter adapt and change the former to domestic preferences and contexts (Thomann, 2019). Moreover, operational perspectives highlight the varieties of what could be "successful" problem-solvingprocedural, programmatic, or political (Marsh & McConnell, 2010;Weaver, 2014), while the EU MLG literature often reduces this to the question of compliance with EU decisions (Treib, 2014). The policy implementation perspective offers important insights into how problem tractability and issue salience as well as levels of ambiguity and conflict interact with different (EU) governance and implementation modes when affecting actual implementation success (Heidbreder, 2017;Matland, 1995;Sabatier & Mazmanian, 1980;Spendzharova & Versluis, 2013;Thomann, 2019;Versluis, 2003Versluis, , 2007.…”

Policy Monitoring in the EU: The Impact of Institutions, Implementation, and Quality

“…Important factors in transposition (and, to a certain degree, also in the formulation of regulations) related to member states' willingness to comply include party politics, institutional goodness of fit (or misfit), public opinion, and the presence or absence of interest groups. By contrast, states' capacity to comply may be influenced by the number of veto players as well as administrative capacity (Treib 2014). More recent literature has also pointed to the important role of EU agencies in implementation (Thomann and Sager 2017).…”

“…More recent literature has also pointed to the important role of EU agencies in implementation (Thomann and Sager 2017). However, two shortcomings of this literature are that it has mainly focused on the transposition of EU directives (with a general neglect of the application of EU regulations), and it has also understood policy monitoring as an enforcement tool rather than another site of implementation (Treib 2014). The implementation of the monitoring mechanism may thus depend on its legal base as well as its specific institutional setting.…”

Judicialized Law‐Making and Opportunistic Enforcement: Explaining the EU's Challenge of National Defence Offsets

“…Implementation and enforcement are the subjects of an increasingly sophisticated field of EU compliance research (Treib, ). On the one hand, many studies focus on the transposition and implementation of secondary legislation (Mastenbroek, , p. 1104), and the ‘stick’ of bringing infringements to the ECJ is seen as one of the Commission's most important tools to ensure Member State compliance (Börzel, , pp.…”