Policy change and Europeanization: Implementing the European Union’s Habitats Directive in Germany and the United Kingdom

Abstract

The Habitats Directive is the cornerstone of the European Union’s nature conservation policy. Its cumbersome and contested implementation is analysed across multiple levels of governance in Germany and the United Kingdom, focusing on forest policy. In an analysis that aligns Börzel and Risse’s approach to Europeanization with Hall’s policy change model, policy documents and interviews with 49 policy stakeholders are analysed. It is shown that policy change through implementation develops slowly and to different degrees. Europeanization through the Habitats Directive is dependent on specific institutional departure points, progressing in distinct waves triggered by various facilitating factors. Aligning both theoretical frameworks supports a better understanding of specific temporal, strategic, and spatial patterns of policy change through implementation. However, these frameworks also have weaknesses: under specific circumstances paradigmatic policy change occurs even where only instrumental settings have changed.

Keywords:

• policy change
• Europeanization
• forest policy
• Habitats Directive
• Natura 2000
• implementation

Acknowledgements

The data used here were collected and analysed within the European Beech Forests for the Future Project (http://www.befofu.org/). BeFoFu is funded by national funding agencies (for Germany: the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research). We are grateful to our funders and the experts who devoted their time for the interviews.