Compliance, communication and competition: patterns of EU environmental policy making and their impact on policy convergence

Responsibility for environmental policy making in Europe has shifted to the EU level to a remarkable extent. Considering that many of the EU measures aim at levelling the playing field between member states and even achieving the harmonization of national policies, one might expect far‐reaching convergence of environmental policy in Europe, but there are a number of domestic and policy‐specific factors diverting the path from reaching convergence. In this contribution we are interested in the specific effects of different patterns of European governance on domestic environmental policies. In this respect, we are particularly interested in the scope of national institutional change and cross‐national convergence of regulatory institutions. We distinguish between three ideal–typical governance patterns: (1) prescriptive governance based on the compliance of national implementers with legally binding EU rules, (2) communicative governance based on information exchange between regulatory agents across national levels arranged in a EU legal or institutional framework and (3) competitive governance based on competition between national administrative systems to achieve EU requirements. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.