NGOs as new Guardians of the Treaties? Analysing the effectiveness of NGOs as decentralised enforcers of EU law

ABSTRACT

The European Union is increasingly resorting to a decentralised enforcement strategy in which it relies less on the Commission-initiated infringement procedure, and more on domestic litigation by particularly NGOs. In order to better understand whether this is a suitable strategy to tackle the compliance deficit, we need more insight into NGOs as decentralised enforcers of EU law. What do NGOs do to stimulate domestic compliance, and is this a potentially effective alternative to the centralised enforcement strategies? Analysing the actions by the German NGO Deutsche Umwelthilfe in relation to the Ambient Air Quality Directive, reveals high potential for the role to be played by NGOs. This exploratory case illustrates that particularly the strategy of flooding the country with a wave of legal proceedings was effective in increasing the salience of the topic, thereby indirectly releasing those capacities that the authorities had still lacked to comply.

KEYWORDS:

• compliance
• decentralised enforcement
• environmental policy
• European Union
• NGOs

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the respondents for their willingness to talk to us and help us gather the information required for this article, and we would like to thank the reviewers for their very insightful and constructive feedback that helped improve the article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The right of a party to appear and be heard before a court.

2 The interviews were conducted between April-May 2021. Names are not listed in order to guarantee anonymity, and interviewees are referred to as IA (Implementing Authorities), DUH (Deutsche Umwelthilfe) or EC (European Commission). As not many officials are primarily responsible for air quality per state, we do not reveal which five states have been selected for this research. EC officials’ statements do not reflect the position of their institution.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Konstantin Reiners

Konstantin Reiners studied the BA European Studies at Maastricht University, and is now an MA student at the MA International Security at Science Po.

Esther Versluis

Esther Versluis is Professor of European Regulatory Governance at Maastricht University.