Signing Globally, Implementing Locally: Protecting Endangered Wildlife and the Predicament of Germany’s Federalism

ABSTRACT

Germany has signed numerous international treaties for the protection and conservation of endangered wildlife and has transposed these, as well as related EU directives and regulations, into national law over the years with due diligence. It has been traditionally considered one of Europe’s environmental leaders. Yet, despite its reputation, Germany often seems unwilling and/or unable to enforce environmental laws and regulations. Germany’s federalism has led to a patchwork of enforcement of environmental laws, via either centralised, decentralised, or cooperative enforcement regimes. We aim to address this seeming contradiction through the theoretical lens of street-level bureaucracy to understand how federalism expands and/or constrains discretion. Our study relies on a mixed-methods approach incorporating qualitative and quantitative data. The qualitative analysis utilises about forty interviews of German street-level bureaucrats (SLBs), other government officials, politicians, and NGO representatives. We corroborate this through multivariate panel regressions on environmental crime outcomes using data regarding crimes recorded and solved at both the municipal (2016–2020) and state (2013–2021) level from the Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (Bundeskriminalamt, BKA). Our results indicate that decentralisation of enforcement authority down the municipal level has considerable drawbacks, while cooperative and centralised arrangements perform more favourably.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Elizabeth A. Cox for research assistance on this project.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2024.2342960.

Data availability statement

Available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for this project provided by the Research Council of Norway’s Independent Projects (FRIPRO) Programme.

Notes on contributors

Kayla M. Gabehart

Kayla M. Gabehart is an assistant professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Michigan Technological University. Her research interests include environmental policy, urban-rural conflict, emotions, democracy, and the policy process. She has previously published in Public Integrity, Climate Action, Review of Policy Research, and European Policy Analysis, among others.

Christoph H. Stefes

Christoph H. Stefes is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Colorado Denver and a Senior Associate at Ecologic Institute Berlin. His research interests include comparative politics, international relations, environmental politics, and autocratic regimes and democratisation. He has published widely, most recently in Global Policy, Review of Policy Research, Frontiers in Political Science, Critical Criminology, Journal of Public Policy, and European Policy Analysis.