Leaders and Laggards: European Environmental Implementation
By: Fsi Student Programs
Tags: Tecfsi, Brussels, Stanford, European Union, Fsi Students

About the author: Benek Robertson ’20 is an FSI The Europe Center Undergraduate Intern at the Centre for European Policy and LICOS, in Brussels Belgium. Benek is currently a Political Science major at Stanford University.

For my last night in Brussels, my friends and I wandered the buzzing squares around the EU institutions. Place Luxembourg was packed with smartly-dressed young Europeans, jackets slung over their shoulders and sleeves rolled up. Low electronic beats drifted from the nearby bars, mingling with the hum of engines and voices. The heat of the day had faded to a heavy evening sauna. Everywhere around me, the city plodded towards a sweltering night. We sat on the lawn in front of the Commission, fanning with our hands and taking in the churn of bureaucrats and storm clouds. It was a sensory standout: the hottest day in Belgian history made for a memorable end to this summer in Europe.

My internship at LICOS has come to a close, and though it’s sad to move on from Belgium and this project, there are research successes that I’m proud to have spearheaded, especially over such a short internship. My work was focused on the implementation of EU environmental policy. Understanding the factors that influence transposition — the process of individual states implementing European directives — helps to better map the region’s environmental progress. In the last week of the job, I finished our sheet of European Court of Justice (ECJ) environmental violations, changing national GDPs, and much more. Creating a dataset from scratch was time-consuming but rewarding work, and I’m happy to have contributed to the less glamorous side of implementation research.

From here, I ran some preliminary regressions in hopes of uncovering some factors that consistently influence policy implementation. The dependent variable was the number of ECJ environmental violations (reasoned opinions, court referrals, and the sum of both) per country per year. This was regressed against GDP, GDP per capita, and indexes that track government effectiveness, government political power, and veto points within each nation’s government. I enjoyed working with quantitative data and looking for trends in environmental policy implementation across the European Union.

This research — though somewhat curtailed by the short internship — unearthed some interesting findings. In all of the regressions run, GDP was found to have a high significance. There was a small but consistent negative effect: greater GDP led to less infringement proceedings. My analysis found no significance for bureaucratic effectiveness or GDP per capita. These metrics sought to explore government capacity; this result breaks with similar research in the field. This data found some evidence to suggest that increased number of veto points had a positive effect on environmental noncompliance. This is an interesting finding, because it suggests that political constraints in some countries make national resistance to EU policy implementation easier.

Limited time in Belgium curtailed the scope of my work; this project is far from complete, and there are a lot of exciting directions for future progress. I would be very interested to test other metrics for bureaucratic effectiveness, as this conventionally has a significant relationship with policy implementation. Also, with some indices — such as those for political power — I didn’t have access to national values for each tested year. Instead of relying on previous papers and their 2015 figures, it would be interesting to calculate these values myself and take a more precise look at the effects of political power on environmental policy implementation.

I’m so grateful to have had this research opportunity. LICOS was full of welcoming and helpful people: it was a treat to spend lunches spent chatting with professors, researchers, and PhD candidates who are eager to share their own research ideas and provide guidance. I’m very passionate about environmental policy, and this chance to further our understanding of its effectiveness was rewarding and fascinating. Leaving the city during a record heat wave underscored the urgency behind this research. I sweated through the streets of Brussels that evening, thinking about the larger significance of environmental policy and its effectiveness. This internship’s contribution felt impactful, and I am eager to continue working in this field.