The Search for Convergence of National Policies in the European Union

Димитрова, Антоанета; Steunenberg, Bernard

doi:10.1177/1465116500001002003

Cited by 105 publications

(76 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…He conceptualises the process of incorporating a directive as a strategic game among several domestic players with distinct policy preferences (Steunenberg 2006; see also Dimitrova and Steunenberg 2000 for an earlier version of this argument). Crucial factors in this game are the type of instrument that needs to be adopted to transpose a directive and the 7 Linos (2006) also uses the official information on transposition reported in the Commission's annual reports.…”

Section: The Third Wave: Theoretical and Methodological Differentiationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implementing and complying with EU governance outputs

Treib¹

2008

Living Rev. Euro. Gov.

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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 three different waves of EU implementation scholarship. The first wave considered implementation primarily a problem of institutional efficiency. In the second wave, the degree of compatibility between European demands and domestic policy legacies took centre stage. However, many second-wave scholars complemented the basic "misfit" argument with a set of additional explanatory factors to account for deviant cases. In the third wave, some researchers began to stress the role of domestic politics, while others re-discovered the importance of administrative capabilities. As an attempt to synthesise some of the partial explanations presented by earlier research, one group of scholars pointed to the existence of culturally-shaped country clusters, each with its own typical style of complying with EU legislation.After this historical overview, the paper summarises the most important theoretical, empirical and methodological lessons to be drawn from existing studies and it discusses promising avenues for future research. First, most scholars seem to agree on the basic set of factors that may have an impact on transposition processes. The main task to be accomplished by future research is to establish under which conditions which configurations of factors prevail. While we already know that there are strong country-specific patterns, the importance of sectorspecific patterns will need to be explored further. Second, much more research efforts will have to be devoted to the neglected area of enforcement and application. In theoretical terms, going back to the insights of traditional domestic implementation research seems to be most promising for this type of studies. Third, the paper cautions against the poor quality of the data employed by the growing number quantitative compliance studies. Unless the problems with the data can be solved, scholars are well advised to rely on comparative case studies, at least in addition to statistical analyses. To increase the number of cases to be covered by qualitative research, the paper makes the case for crafting collaborative qualitative research projects as a viable alternative to quantitative research.This review is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Austria License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/at/ How to cite this articleOwing to the fact that a Living Reviews article can evolve over time, we recommend to cite the article as follows:Oliver Treib, "Implementing and complying with EU governance outputs", Living Rev.

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Section: The Third Wave: Theoretical and Methodological Differentiationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implementing and complying with EU governance outputs

Treib¹

2008

Living Rev. Euro. Gov.

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“…For exploring how the EU matters, Europeanization research has focused on adaptation pressures and the implementation of European directives and regulations (see, for example, Knill 2001Knill , 2005Cowles et al 2001;Héritier et al 2001;Knill and Lehmkuhl 2002;Olsen 2002;Börzel and Risse 2003). The growing policy-shaping power of the EU has also motivated a number of political scientists to ask whether Europeanization leads to crossnational policy convergence (see, for example, Dimitrova and Steunenberg 2000;Hix and Goetz 2000;Knill 2001;Risse et al 2001;Jordan and Liefferink 2004;Holzinger andKnill 2004, 2005;Holzinger et al 2008a,b). The overarching result is that regarding environmental policy, the EU has affected some aspects of the policy content in all of its member states.…”

Section: State Of the Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hierarchy, networks, or markets: how does the EU shape environmental policy adoptions within and beyond its borders?

Knill¹,

Tosun²

2009

Journal of European Public Policy

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In this study we scrutinize the strength of the European Union's 'external governance' in the area of environmental policy. We explore whether accession candidates and third countries adopted European environmental legislation along with the member states. In doing so, we focus on Community laws that limit nitrogen oxides in the emissions into the air from large combustion plants, introduce the European ecolabel scheme and environmental impact assessments. Our analysis reveals that hierarchical governance is the most significant and robust determinant of policy adoption. Additionally, our results lend some support to the relevance of network governance, indicating that this mode could become more effective at greater length.

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“…They presented a policy-specific procedural model of transposition, which is based on the idea that the actor constellation relevant for transposition varies between individual cases. These may range from a politicised legislative mode to a more technical bureaucratic mode (Steunenberg 2006(Steunenberg , 2007 see also Dimitrova and Steunenberg 2000). The crucial factor in this model is the type of instrument that needs to be adopted to transpose a directive.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Implementing and complying with EU governance outputs

Treib¹

2014

Living Rev. Euro. Gov.

176

202

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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.

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The Search for Convergence of National Policies in the European Union

Cited by 105 publications

References 8 publications

Implementing and complying with EU governance outputs

Implementing and complying with EU governance outputs

Hierarchy, networks, or markets: how does the EU shape environmental policy adoptions within and beyond its borders?

Implementing and complying with EU governance outputs

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