Environmental governance in Southern Europe: the domestic filters of Europeanisation

Over the last two decades, the EU has shown a preference for the replacement of traditional command-and-control patterns of environmental regulation with more cooperative policy schemes in the expectation of improving compliance in member states. But has the EU performed as a ‘governance-shaper’ in member states, such as Spain, Portugal and Greece that have little tradition of non-hierarchical styles of environmental policy-making? To what extent has the domestic institutional context modulated the Europeanisation of environmental governance in these three Southern countries? The EU influence on the emergence of new schemes of governance in these Southern member states has been modelled by domestic institutional pathways encompassing territorial structure, policy saliency and trust between state and non-state actors.