Innovative Approaches to EU Multilevel Implementation: Moving Beyond Legal Compliance

Multi-level governance systems like the European Union (EU) calibrate integration with member state discretion in order to implement common, yet context-sensitive solutions to shared policy problems. Research on implementation in the EU typically focuses on legal compliance with EU policy. However, this focus gives us an incomplete picture of EU implementation, its diversity and practice. The contributions of this collection represent a shift toward a more performance-oriented perspective on EU implementation as problem-solving. They approach implementation fundamentally as a process of interpretation of superordinate law by actors who are embedded within multiple contexts arising from the coexistence of dynamics of Europeanization, on the one hand, and what has been termed ‘domestication’, on the other. Moving beyond legal compliance, the contributions provide new evidence on the diversity of domestic responses to EU policy, the roles and motivations of actors implementing EU policy, and the ‘black box’ of EU law in action and its enforcement. By reassessing the relative importance of EU policy and domestic factors and actors for the outcomes of EU implementation, the results give insight into on the nuanced interplay between Europeanization and domestication forces, useful for both EU researchers and practitioners.

The chapters originally published as a special issue in the Journal of European Public Policy.