Abstract
AbstractAs far as local governments are responsible for the practical implementation of many European Union (EU) policies, they codetermine member states’ EU compliance records and the fate of EU legislation. Yet, they do so in remarkably different ways, as exemplified by the variegated implementation of the Ambient Air Quality Directive 2008/50/EC by Dutch municipalities. Taking guidance from the literature on EU compliance, in this article we explain the differences in local implementation performance based on the political and managerial approaches. Understanding which of the two approaches drives different local responses to EU policy bears consequences for the appropriate remedy for nonimplementation. Four municipalities were purposefully selected along with the two-by-two implementation performance scoring matrix in the realm of air quality. A comparative within-case analysis specifies how political explanations outweigh managerial explanations in accounting for variation in implementation performance and distils ‘policy saliency’ as the driving causal mechanism.
Highlights
Local governments are responsible for the practical implementation of many European Union (EU) policies
When it comes to theoretical contributions, by examining whether the explanatory variables identified for the variation in national compliance with EU policies hold in the local context we explore the strength of implementation theory
In each municipality we interviewed policy officers from environment, traffic and transit departments; aldermen with environment, traffic and transit affairs in their portfolios; consultants involved in the implementation process, local environmental groups, local Community Health Services (GGDs), local industries or companies affected by local air quality policy, and local citizens’ associations
Summary
Local governments are responsible for the practical implementation of many European Union (EU) policies. Compared to the Water Framework Directive, the AAQ directive has received less scholarly attention (for an overview see Bondarouk and Mastenbroek, 2018) When it comes to theoretical contributions, by examining whether the explanatory variables identified for the variation in national compliance with EU policies hold in the local context we explore the strength of implementation theory (see Saetren, 2014: 86; Winter, 2012: 265). The Netherlands present an interesting case for investigating whether differences in local AAQ policy implementation performance can be attributed to political or management explanations. They provide a ranking of medium-sized municipalities based on their AAQ implementation performance along with an extensive codebook, detailing what measures were taken over the 2005–2015 period They have mapped which municipalities were more comprehensive in their policy output than others. It is almost intuitively important to check for this explanation in our data
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