Change as "Appropriate Adaptation": Administrative Adjustment to European Environmental Policy in Britain and Germany

This paper is looking at European environmental policy from the "second image reversed" perspective. Specifically, it investigates the conditions under which we see administrative change in the EU member states as a consequence of the implementation of EU environmental policies. We adopt a comparative research design analyzing the impact of four environmental policies in Britain and Germany to trace the conditions for adaptation in the context of different administrative structures and traditions. As a starting hypothesis we adopt the institutionalist expectation that administrative adaptation depends on the "goodness of fit" between European policy requirements and existing national structures and procedures. On the basis of our empirical evidence we further refine the notion of "goodness of fit" by looking at the level of embeddedness of national structures in the overall administrative tradition from a static and dynamic perspective. Furthermore, we develop an explanatory framework that links sociological and rational choice variants of institutional analysis

"Seek and Ye Shall Find" : linking Different Perspectives on Institutional Change

Two theoretical schools rationalist and constructivist approaches dominate the literature on policy and nstitutional change. They tend to focus the debate on the ontological understanding of human behavior and hence the logic behind change. The authors note that another dimension of change namely, its scope is treated unsatisfactorily in the literature due to a neglect of the level of abstraction used as a point of departure by different studies. Hence, the literature is littered with false debates couched in the language of ontological disagreement.Aregrouping of the literature into structure- and agency-based approaches will help to take for more systematic account of the levels of abstraction problem and therefore the varying measuring rods applied to assess the scope of change. The authors analytical focus runs orthogonal to the question of ontology and complements the dominant debate by allowing for a separation of different analytical dimensions in the study of political change

New Concepts - Old Problems? The Institutional Constraints for the Effective Implementation of EU Environmental Politcy

Effektive Implementation europäischer Politik ist ein wichtiger Indikator für die Steuerungskapazität der EU. Speziell in der europäischen Umweltpolitik, dem Paradebeispiel für ineffektive Implementation, ist es in diesem Zusammenhang zu einer grundlegenden Umorientierung in der Instrumentenwahl gekommen. An die Stelle interventionistischer Konzepte treten verstärkt flexible und kontextorientierte Steuerungsansätze. Empirische Studien belegen jedoch, daß neue Instrumente bisher keineswegs zu besseren Implementationsergebnissen führten als traditionelle Konzepte. Der ausbleibende Erfolg neuer umweltpolitischer Steuerungskonzepte kann vor dem Hintergrund mehrerer Faktoren erklärt werden, die sich sowohl auf die theoretische Ambiguität der Implementationsforschung beziehen als auch auf die defizitäre Anwendung dieser Theorie. Wir argumentieren, daß diese Defizite zumindest teilweise vermieden werden können, wenn die Implementationsaussichten unterschiedlicher Steuerungsinstrumente aus einer institutionalistischen Perspektive interpretiert werden. Es wird gezeigt, daß die Implementationseffektivität europäischer Policies weniger durch die Wahl des Steuerungsmodus per se beeinflußt wird, sondern durch das Ausmaß der von diesen Policies ausgehenden Anpassungszwänge auf nationale administrative Strukturen und Prozesse

“‘Where You Stand Depends on Where You Sit!’ Linking Different Perspectives on Institutional Change”

We argue that, despite and-paradoxically-even because of their theoretical variance, different approaches provide complementary rather than competing explanations, since they tend to focus on different aspects of the same empirical phenomenon. Confirming Allison’s important insight from the early 1970s, we observe that they evaluate the same development from different analytical levels, applying different scales to measure institutional change. The detection of path-dependent developments by one approach and revolutionary transformations by the other must therefore not necessarily reflect theoretical contradiction. It may well be linked in a complementary way, if different analytical levels are explicitly taken into account. In short, variances in theoretical assumptions and expectations, when linked to distinctive analytical levels for the evaluation of institutional change, are no obstacles for the integration of institutional approaches, but even favor complementary explanations

Compliance, Competition and Communication: Different Approaches of European Governance and their Impact on National Institutions

This analysis focuses on the relationship between supranational regulatory policy and national administrative change. We argue that the potential for change and cross-national convergence varies with the particular governance pattern employed, namely coercion, competition and communication. We identify the behavioural rationalities that guide the national bureaucratic responses and point to certain paradoxes with regard to the extent and direction of change. Copyright 2005 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

"Modes of regulation in the governance of the European Union: Towards a comprehensive evaluation"

[T]his [paper] has two objectives. First, it is our aim to structure the complex picture of different modes of EU regulation. To arrive at a differentiated picture of the EU regulatory state, we develop a typology of different modes of European regulation ranging from classical legal instruments to softer forms of steering the economy and society. In a second step, we are looking at the regulatory transition from a normative angle. Although the choice of regulatory instruments will always be the result of political processes shaped by interests, power as well as institutional constellations, the functionality of regulatory instruments in terms of policy outcome and societal impac

Coping with Europe: The Impact of British and German Administrations on the Implementation of EU Environmental Policy

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020

Compliance, Communication and Competition : Patterns of EU Environmental Policy Making and Their Impact on Policy Convergence

Responsibility for environmental policy making in Europe has shifted to the EU level to a remarkable extent. Considering that many of the EU measures aim at levelling the playing field between member states and even achieving the harmonization of national policies, one might expect far-reaching convergence of environmental policy in Europe, but there are a number of domestic and policy-specific factors diverting the path from reaching convergence. In this contribution we are interested in the specific effects of different patterns of European governance on domestic environmental policies. In this respect, we are particularly interested in the scope of national institutional change and cross-national convergence of regulatory institutions. We distinguish between three ideal typical governance patterns: (1) prescriptive governance based on the compliance of national implementers with legally binding EU rules, (2) communicative governance based on information exchange between regulatory agents across national levels arranged in a EU legal or institutional framework and (3) competitive governance based on competition between national administrative systems to achieve EU requirements. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment