Assessing National Patterns of EU Implementation: EU Environmental Policy Implementation in the Netherlands

This paper starts from the assumption that a comparative politics perspective may shed new light on questions of EU regulatory compliance. As a case in point, the paper uses Lundqvist’s classical study of air pollution policy in the USA and Sweden (1980) as a starting point for assessing the implementation of a number of EU water and environmental directives. Thus, implementation patterns are explained with the help of the following political-institutional variables: (1) visibility of the policy process, (2) accountability of politicians and policy makers vis-à-vis their stakeholders and the EU, (3) division of responsibilities for policy formulation vs. implementation and (4) the involvement of the public. The set of variables based on Lundqvist will be set off against alternative comparative politics approaches, such as the study of national policy styles, and against traditional theories of implementation, such as the ‘fit-misfit’ hypothesis and the ‘worlds of compliance’ approach. The empirical analysis will focus on the Water Framework Directive, the Floods Directive, the Air Quality Directive and possibly others. In a first step, described in this paper, the analysis will be limited to a single Member State, i.e. The Netherlands. It will be considered if similar patterns can be observed across different directives and to what extent these add up to what may be called a national implementation style founded upon domestic political-institutional characteristics. If results are promising, the analysis should in a next step be widened to cover several Member States.