Scaling down non-compliance?

The responsibility of complying with EU legislation lies with the member states. The range, however, of actors involved in the implementation process has widened, making compliance a dynamic interplay between state and non-state actors. The present thesis makes a first attempt to quantitatively analyze the impact of non-state actors on compliance with EU environmental directives, across the 27 EU member states. The thesis adopts a broader conceptualization of non-state actors in order to account for both organized and diffused societal interests and derives hypotheses from the three approaches to compliance (enforcement, management, and legitimacy) in an integrated manner. Subsequently, by taking into account a subset of 24 recently adopted environmental directives, the thesis also seeks to assess cross-national variation and shed light on existing patterns of environmental leaders and laggards. By relying on infringement data to account for member states’ levels of non-compliance and by employing a cross-classified multilevel method of analysis, the empirical findings reveal a rather surprising mismatch between societal actors’ expected role and their actual impact on member states’ compliance. The results show that environmental non-state actors are more constrained in their ability to impact policymaking and exert pressure on national governments to comply than what was previously assumed by case studies. This is particularly the case when considering organized societal interests and the role of NGOs in influencing policy outcomes. Furthermore, the findings indicate one factor that can positively influence compliance: citizens’ perceived importance of the environment and climate change. By consequence, citizens’ perceptions on the importance of specific policy issues can exert domestic pressure on member states’ compliance. Moreover, the analysis does not suggest a particular pattern with respect to country groupings or ‘worlds of compliance’ thus one cannot speak of either a Southern problem or an Eastern one. Southern and Central and Eastern European countries occupy space as both leaders and laggards. In sum, the findings have implications for both the compliance literature and the future of the broader EU environmental policy.