Compliance with EU environmental law. The iceberg is melting

ABSTRACT

The European Union (EU) has become the main driver for environmental policy output for its member states whose number has more than tripled over the past four decades. The EU’s deepening and widening has led researchers to expect more non-compliance with EU environmental legislation. In fact, however, the implementation gap has narrowed over the past 25 years. Except for Southern enlargement, taking on new member states has not exacerbated the EU’s compliance problem in the field of environmental policy. Nor has the expansion of the environmental acquis. This is explained by the European Commission’s strategies of managing and enforcing compliance. EU environmental policy has become less demanding on member states since it increasingly tends to amend existing rather than set new legislation. Simultaneously, the Commission has developed new instruments to strengthen member state capacities to implement EU environmental legislation.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental policy
• compliance
• implementation
• infringements
• enlargement
• European Commission

Acknowledgments

We thank the special issue editors as well as Viviane Gravey and Yaffa Epstein for their helpful comments on previous versions. We are particularly grateful to Andrea Lenschow for her excellent written feedback, Dimiter Toshkov for the data used in Figure 7 and to Lukas Blasius for his outstanding research assistance. We have also greatly benefited from discussion of earlier drafts at: the workshop ‘Whither the environment in Europe?’ ECPR Joint Sessions, Pisa, 24-28 April 2016; the workshop organized by Andreas Hofmann on ‘The Future of Environmental Policy in the European Union’ at the University of Gothenburg, 19–20 January 2017; and a dedicated panel at the European Union Studies Association (EUSA) Biannual Conference, Miami, FL, 3–5 May 2017.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. As our database includes only EU legislation starting from 1978, the first court referrals of these legal pieces are in 1981.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation [BO 1831/1-1 and BO 1831/6-1].