Suchergebnisse

AbstractState aid rules are an important part of the European Union's (EU) competition policy that aims to ensure a fair competition in the common market. These rules directly affect national and sub‐national governments of member states, which are sometimes confronted with different and opposing claims about what to do. The question is how implementing civil servants interpret and resolve these claims in practice. In this article, discourse analysis is applied to identify how civil servants apply and interpret state aid rules based on empirical research in the Netherlands. The main finding is that, even within the existing regulatory framework of one member state, the application of state aid rules is understood differently based on the discourses we identified. We describe the content, dissemination amongst civil servants and the relationship of these discourses with compliance. The article shows that discourses matter and help to understand how state aid rules are applied.

In its public discourse, the European Commission presented the EU's most recent Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as a paradigm change. Many observers of the CAP reform process, however, describe the recent agreement as a lost opportunity for change. This article describes and analyses the Commission's discursive strategies in response to the legitimacy challenges regarding the CAP's direct payments. We draw on the work of Mark Suchman (1995) to analyse these responses. The analysis reveals a progression of legitimation strategies that can be linked to the broader institutional environment, the setting of the ongoing policy process and the (critical) reaction of civil society organisations to these strategies. Besides shedding light on the progression of legitimation strategies, this article contributes to the literature on the Commission's legitimation strategies more generally by linking the Commission's public discourse to its public consultation regime.

AbstractThis article investigates the policy discourses at European level and in France, Germany and the UK during the debate on the CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) post‐2013 reform. The neoliberal discourse that has provided the intellectual justification for reform during the last decade is now increasingly combined with a 'public goods' discourse related to the multifunctionalist discourse of the 1990s. Innovating on earlier discursive analyses of the CAP debate, this article distinguishes between discourses used during the uploading (negotiations) and the downloading (implementation) phases. In doing so it uncovers the effects of domestic‐international interactions on the application of different competing discourses. The member states' domestic legitimating discourses applied to 'sell' the eventual CAP agreement tend to align with existing domestic policy paradigms rather than with dominant discourses at the EU level, indicating that discourses are prone to strategic usage.

The concept of green services, developed in the Netherlands, aimed at rewarding activities by farmers in the field of nature and landscape management with a 'market-based price' provided by public and private actors. Despite a positive stance on the concept at member-state level, it took considerable efforts to get the concept implemented. The selected case, which is an exemplary case for a more general reorientation on the provision of agrienvironmental measures (eg in the context of the EU Common Agricultural Policy), shows that uncertainties of the EU state aid regime and complex power relationships within a multilevel governance setting led to much delay. We explain these difficulties by drawing from new-institutional and sense-making literature and the literature on escalation. We also show how a modus vivendi was found for establishing the green service concept and thereby provide insights for initiators of new agrienvironmental schemes or other horizontal modes of governance.

AbstractThis article aims to explain the variation in duration of preliminary investigations in the state aid notification procedure. While this procedure is guided by objective standards, preliminary investigations result in an overwhelming majority of cases being approved in combination with a large variation in duration. This study explores the explanatory power of political and managerial factors at the member state and state aid case level to account for this variation. Based on multilevel regression analysis of a newly created dataset, results show that both political and managerial factors at the state aid case level affect the duration of preliminary investigations. No evidence was found for member state level factors having an effect.