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A 'burden reducing' agenda has spurred an increased interest in how EU environmental legislation is transposed into national legislation--most prominently reflected in the principle of 'no gold-plating'. Yet, an important question is to what extent transposition principles and practices may ensure a coherent and accessible body of environmental legislation, while at the same time ensuring adequate transposition of EU environmental legislation. This article analyses the existence, or emergence, of transposition principles and practices in three Member States--the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Denmark. It also examines how EU initiatives may influence these principles and practices. The article concludes that the steering of transposition processes by general transposition principles and objectives alone, and in particular those dominated by a 'burden reducing' agenda, has a limited focus on coherence and accessibility with respect to environmental legislation and that such issues deserve more attention in the transposition process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central problem for improving the implementation effectiveness of European legislation lies in the impact of national administrative traditions. The dependence on national administrations for implementing European policies implies that the formal transposition and practical application of supranational policies are crucially influenced by administrative traditions prevalent in a certain policy field, which may differ substantially from country to country. Focusing on the implementation of EU environmental policy in Britain and Germany, it is the objective of this article to investigate the interplay of national administrative traditions and European policy implementation in closer detail. The main argument is that the extent to which administrative traditions affect implementation effectiveness is less dependent on the 'real' costs of adaptation than on the level of embeddedness of existing structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of why, and how, local authorities in the UK are addressing the practicalities associated with the integration of their economic and environmental objectives. The discussion begins with a contextual outline that illustrates how trends in sustainable development at international, national and community levels have influenced local government to develop new approaches. The discussion then focuses on the responses to the call for integration by looking at how authorities are responding to this pressure in the central strategic areas. After drawing some conclusions as to the effectiveness of the response, the final section of the paper draws the threads together and indicates how the response might develop in future. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]