Tanja A. Börzel - Environmental Leaders and Laggards in Europe: Why There is (Not) a Southern Problem

First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2017 by Routledge

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Copyright Tanja A. Brzel 2003

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Boerzel, Tanja

Environmental leaders and laggards in Europe : why there is

(not) a southern problem. - (Ashgate studies in

environmental policy and practice)

1. Environmental policy - European Union countries -

Cross-cultural studies 2. Compliance 3. Environmental law-

European Union countries

I. Title

333.7094

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brzel, Tanja A.

Environmental leaders and laggards in Europe : why there is (not) a southern problem /

Tanja Boerzel.

p. cm. -- (Ashgate studies in environmental policy and practice)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7546-1687-8

1. Environmental policy--Europe. I. Title. II. Series.

GE212 .B672003

363.7056094--dc21

2002028164

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-1687-0 (hbk)

This book would never have been written if Adrienne Hritier, my PhD advisor, had not insisted that I should give my claims about the transformation of the state some real empirical grounding. In her irresistible way, she talked me into doing a policy study, and I chose the environment, which appeared to me the least boring. A few weeks later, I found myself in Barcelona visiting local water plants in order to understand the problems of Spanish regions in implementing the European Drinking Water Directive. I will never forget my first international conference where I presented the results of my policy study - peoples eyes glazed over when I told them about how difficult it was for Catalan municipalities to comply with European water policies.

I am most grateful to Alberta Sbragia, who read through the first results of my case studies and strongly encouraged me to go on with my work. Thanks to Christoph Knill and Andrea Lenschow, who took me into their project on the implementation of EU environmental policies, I learned how to link detailed empirics with broader theoretical issues. The project helped me to relate my empirical case studies back to the overall question of my dissertation on how Europeanization affects the domestic structures of the member states.

After two years of laborious field research, I naturally included all the empirical details in my PhD thesis. I had a hard job convincing the Political Science Department of the European University Institute to accept the final draft, which was 50,000 words over the limit. Of course, no press was willing to publish a manuscript with more than 400 pages and some 900 footnotes. Cambridge made me cut one-third of my thesis before they would even send it out to the reviewers. It was the policy study, in which they were the least interested. At this point, I decided to do a separate book, which would allow me to fully exploit the assets of my 12 case studies. I felt that my German-Spanish comparison could make a valuable contribution to an ongoing debate in the field of EU environmental policy-making on whether the EU is having a Southern problem and whether its four southern member states are suffering from a disease called Mediterranean Syndrome. After having extensively studied the German case, it became clear to me that non-compliance with European Environmental Law could not be simply blamed on the southern member states. What was needed was an approach that could explain implementation failure and non-compliance across the alleged North-South divide.

The empirical study draws on various sources. Most of the data were collected as part of the already mentioned research project by Christoph Knill and Andrea Lenschow. I am thankful to them for coordinating the project and to the European Commission, which funded it. The statistical data were drawn from a database, which I constructed during my time as the Coordinator of Environmental Studies at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the European University Institute. I am particularly indebted to Yves Mny, the former director of the Schuman Centre, for providing the funding for my research assistant, Charalampos (Babis) Koutalakis, who entered more than 20,000 infringement cases into the database. Without Babis dedication and endurance, the database would not have come into existence. While we ultimately abandoned it, Babis work was not entirely wasted - the Commission would have never given us access to its database, if we had not constructed our own in the first place.

Susan Baker, Matthijs Boogarts, Sonja Bugdahn, Jeffrey Checkel, Alf-Inge Jansen Manuel Jiminez, Christian Joerges, Andrew Jordan, Christoph Knill, Maria Kousis, Andrea Lenschow, Andrea Liese, Duncan Liefferink, Matthias Maier, Yves Mny, Fritz Scharpf, Cornelia Ulbert, Dieter Wolf, and Michael Zrn, commented on various parts of the book. My thanks go to all of them. The presentations in the Working Group of Environmental Studies at the Robert-Schuman-Centre for Advanced Studies and the workshop on Coming to Terms with the Mediterranean Syndrome, organized at the European University Institute in May 2000, were particularly important for me to test my theoretical argument and discuss the empirical findings of my study. I am particularly grateful to the participants of the compliance workshop organized by Christian Joerges and Michael Zrn at the ECPR Joint Session of Workshops in Mannheim, in March 1999.

Finally, Thomas read through the whole manuscript twice. As an International Relations scholar he has never developed a great taste for my detailed empirics. But his reservations encouraged me to look for the big picture in my stories and link them to broader theoretical questions.

The book is dedicated to all students who seek to combine theory-guided research with thorough empirical case studies.

Tanja A. Brzel