Suchergebnisse

Community legislation is unquestionably a factor to be reckoned with in member-state policy making. But the extent and mode of its impact on domestic policies and administrative structures will depend on the existing policy practices and the political and institutional structures of the country in question. In cases where there is a mismatch between an established policy of a member state and a clearly specified European policy mandate, there will be an expectation to adjust, which in turn constitutes a precondition for change. Assuming the existence of a need for change, the ability to adapt will depend on the policy preferences of key actors, and the capacity of institutions to implement reform, realize policy change, and administratively adjust to European requirements. The policy preferences of key actors are influenced by the distributional consequences of the policies to be adopted (Milner 1996); the capacity to change depends on the degree of integrated political leadership, caused by a lack of formal veto points (Tsebelis 1995), or a decisional tradition capable of surmounting formal and factual veto points by way of consensual tripartite decision making. Where there is a divergence of mismatch between European and national policies, and the policy preferences of political leaders are defined by a willingness to adapt, the absence of formal veto points and a cooperative decisional tradition will enhance the capacity to change and to adjust administrative structures in compliance with European policy mandates.

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

If one considers the different environmental action programs of the EU in which the strategic orientation of the EU environmental policy is defined for the mid-range, one can hardly avoid the impression that there has been a comprehensive transformation in the ideas about political governance. On the one hand, since the middle of the eighties, there has been an increasing demand to introduce economic instruments. On the other hand, especially since the beginning of the nineties, context-oriented governance approaches have been emphasized. Since both the middle of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties, a regulatory policy paradigm switch has been explicitly called for in the respective programs, expressed in the language of second generation instruments or new regulatory approaches. However, this transformation in the area of regulatory ideas is only partially reflected in changes in the concrete instruments that are used in the environmental policy legal acts of the EU. The discrepancy between the political declarations and action programs, on the one hand, and the actual decisions being made, on the other, is especially clear with respect to the economic instruments. But when measured in reference to the political demands, it also appears that relatively few context-oriented instruments have been introduced. Command-and-control instruments are still the dominant form of environmental policy governance in the EU.