Politics or management? Analysing differences in local implementation performance of the EU Ambient Air Quality directive

Abstract

As far as local governments are responsible for the practical implementation of many European Union (EU) policies, they codetermine member states’ EU compliance records and the fate of EU legislation. Yet, they do so in remarkably different ways, as exemplified by the variegated implementation of the Ambient Air Quality Directive 2008/50/EC by Dutch municipalities. Taking guidance from the literature on EU compliance, in this article we explain the differences in local implementation performance based on the political and managerial approaches. Understanding which of the two approaches drives different local responses to EU policy bears consequences for the appropriate remedy for nonimplementation. Four municipalities were purposefully selected along with the two-by-two implementation performance scoring matrix in the realm of air quality. A comparative within-case analysis specifies how political explanations outweigh managerial explanations in accounting for variation in implementation performance and distils ‘policy saliency’ as the driving causal mechanism.

Analyzing multi-level governance dynamics from a discourse network perspective: the debate over air pollution regulation in Germany

“…In turn, national governments are responsible for transposing the directives adopted by the European Parliament or the European Council, for assessing air quality, for ensuring that air quality data is publicly available, and for taking the necessary measures to prevent air-pollution levels from exceeding the EU standards [ 24 ]. National and subnational levels of government can also set stricter limits and deadlines than those prescribed by the EU directives [ 4 ]. This limited managerial discretion to implement policies results in outcome variation across the member states [ 24 ].…”

“…The use of this methodological approach helps us to identify the relational dynamics that underlie multi-level governance systems. While several studies have examined policy implementation of air-pollution regulation in Europe [ 4 , 24 ], few have done so from a discursive perspective. Consequently, we do not know which arguments or narratives are put forward at the different levels involved.…”

Driving bans for diesel cars in German cities: The role of ENGOs and Courts in producing an unlikely outcome

“…In contrast, the article does not address the question why driving bans have been adopted in some and not in other cities (this would be an interesting question for a different paper) or if driving bans are adequate means to address the problem of NO 2 concentration excess. So far, the literature has dealt with the use of the right to take legal action by environmental NGOs in Germany in general (Schmidt & Zschiesche, 2018;SRU, 2016;Töller, 2020), the implementation of the EU Ambient Air Quality Directive in Germany (Diegmann et al, 2014;Gollata & Newig, 2017) and other EU member states (e.g., Bondarouk & Liefferink, 2017;Bondarouk et al 2019;Lenschow et al, 2017), the quality of ambient air more generally (e.g., EEA, 2018;UBA, 2018), the diesel scandal (Bratzel, 2018;Gross & Sonnberger, 2020;Palmer, 2019), the detrimental effects of high NO 2 concentration on human health (e.g., EEA, 2018;Jonson et al, 2017;WHO, 2013), the role of NO 2 pollution in German cities as one reason among others to promote electric vehicles (Bollmann & Töller, 2018) and the effects of lawsuits on the level of NO 2 concentrations in Germany (Töller et al, 2021). Law scholars have debated the role of courts in general and of the Federal Administrative Court in particular in paving the way for driving bans (e.g., Franzius, 2018;Mainka, 2018;Scheidler, 2018).…”

Modeling Emissions Sources and Characterization in a Dense Low-Income Township Near Industrial Zones and Mine Dumps (Case of Tsakane, South Africa).

“…On a global scale, 92% of the world's population lived in areas where World Health Organization (WHO) air quality recommendations were not followed in 2014 [1,4,16]. In 2012, air pollution in urban and rural areas was reported to have caused 3 million premature deaths worldwide [8].…”