Scalar dynamics and implications of ambient air quality management in the EU

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative case study across 3 countries and 12 cities of the implementation of the EU Ambient Air Quality (AAQ) Directive in order to show that the research perspectives of the scaling literature and the political science discussion on functionally differentiated governance can be usefully combined to reflect on opportunities and constraints in improving environmental governance. Using document and interview material from the cases and employing the policy arrangement approach, we explore how implementing the directive impact on environmental governance in a multi-level system. We demonstrate that the scalar dynamics triggered by the AAQ Directive may create unexpected problems of spatial misfit in term of rules and resources, which ultimately impinge on the effectiveness of the policy in question. Similarly, we find that the territorial rescaling down to the local level is not a panacea for facilitating bottom-up public involvement.

Keywords:

• EU air quality policy
• implementation
• public involvement
• scale adapted governance
• spatial misfit

Acknowledgements

The authors express their gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who helped improve the article both in analytical and empirical terms. We are also very grateful for the support and advise by Peter Feindt and Jens Newig as well as Elena Bondarouk who offered very colleagial input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Andrea Lenschow is Professor of European Politics and Jean Monnet Chair at Osnabrück University. Her research focuses on European Union governance and environmental policy.

Sara Theresa Becker is coordinator of the Open University Study Program in Environmental Studies (Infernum) at Hagen University.

Catharina Mehl was doctoral researcher at Osnabrück University and currently works as free-lance project manager.

Notes

1 The AAQ policy comprises the first framework directive 96/62/EC, its daughter directives (1999/30/EC; 2000/69/EC; 2002/3/EC; 2004/107/EC) and the new framework directive (2008/50/EC) that merged most of the legislation and added several new aspects such as air quality objectives for PM_2.5.

2 Considering the qualitative PAA, no quantitative measure on the number of similar responses can be presented from the interview data. These were not singular statements, however. Typically, they came from the administration, often trying to explain local performance gaps. The will to act does not seem to correlate with this assessment as especially Kraków has been trying to develop a greening image (interview data).

3 Interview evidence cuts across all countries and all interview groups (administrators, politicians, interest groups); indirect evidence was given with some local politicians confusing ambient air policy with climate policy.

4 http://www.umweltbundesamt.de/themen/luft/luftschadstoffe/feinstaub/umweltzonen-in-deutschland. In the absence of emission zones, similar evidence from the other two countries is missing.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Grant Number LE 2396/2-1].