Understanding the Effectiveness of EU Environmental Policy: How Can Regime Analysis Contribute?

The study of EU environmental policy consequences tends to focus on how EU legislation output is formally implemented in the Member States and its impact in terms of the state of the European environment. The crucial outcome dimension linking output to impact has, however, received scant attention. Outcome points to changes in the behaviour of relevant target groups causing the problems in the first place. Accordingly, we know little about the causal relationships between EU environmental policy and the state of the European environment. This article examines whether the study of regime-effectiveness has something to contribute in order to bridge this gap. Since EU legislation comes close to the notion of international regimes in the implementation phase, this article argues that analysis and analyses of regime effectiveness can contribute important insights on how to evaluate and explain the effectiveness of EU environmental policy. In particular, the regime analysis perspective is important for understanding how interaction between EU directives and international environmental regimes affect the performance of EU environmental policy and vice versa. However, the study of regime effectiveness has clear limitations in the domestic context. Moreover, regime analysis has much to learn from EU studies particularly related to environmental policy integration.