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 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.

Europe at the frontline: analysing street-level motivations for the use of European Union migration law

“…While the limited literature on practical EU implementation has treated administrations as yet another source for non-compliance (Versluis 2007) or ignored the street-level of EU implementation (Treib 2014), this study has shown that lower level implementers are surprisingly aware of the multilevel legal context in which they operate. Most implementers eventually give priority to national guidance in their decisions (see also Mastenbroek 2017).…”

The power of implementers: a three-level game model of compliance with EU policy and its application to cultural heritage

“…The study of transposition of EU directives in the national legislations of the member states has become part of a very extensive literature (Mastenbroek 2005;Toshkov et al 2010;Treib 2014). A long-standing weakness of this literature has been the predominance of transposition studies taking the adoption of (directives) into national legislation as a measure for compliance.…”

“…The literature on compliance with EU law comprises more than three generations of studies using different models and approaches to transposition and policy implementation in the EU (Mastenbroek 2005;Toshkov et al 2010;Treib 2014).…”

Introduction

“…We assess and explain implementation in selected national contexts (see below). We employ two main approaches focusing on the relationship between the EU and member-state levels to explain variation in implementation (Treib 2008;Di Lucia and Kronsell 2010). The first centres on the degree of 'fit' between EU requirements and national status quo.…”

“…Domestic politics explains responses to EU policies by the state (or its government) and society, and the relationship between the state and society (Underdal and Hanf 2000;Treib 2008;Di Lucia and Kronsell 2010). New governments may bring in new priorities after EU policies have been negotiated and adopted.…”