EU Environmental Policies in Subnational Regions

This title was first published in 2001: Despite the fact that environmental directives are one of the strongest areas of policy decreed by the EU, it has a much poorer record when it comes to actual implementation of these policies. Instead of focusing on the traditional state-centrist accounts, this book compares two subnational regions within the EU, Scotland and Bavaria, and their role in the policy process. The author offers a multi-layered implementation map which highlights three main government ’layers’ involved in the filtering process and identifies various formal and informal determinants which shape EU environmental policies during the process. The book not only compares implementation performances between the two regions and their respective states, but also compares the region’s processes against the national processes, thereby exposing determinants that would otherwise remain undetected. In doing so, it confirms that subnational regions feature determinants which differ in many respects from national determinants and influence the effectiveness of EU environmental policies. The book contributes to a better understanding of the implementation deficit and presents a more refined picture of the EU environmental policy ’reality’.