The Implementation of European Environmental Law. Analyzing the Interplay of Culture, Capacity, and Power.

This paper gives an overview of the qualitative findings within a larger research project on non-compliancewith EU law, which draws on a unique and comprehensive database on all the infringementproceedings opened against member states by the European Commission between1978 and 1999. By using panel-econometrical methods, the quantitative part of the project testedthe explanatory power of three prominent compliance approaches in the literature - enforcement,management and legitimacy- for explaining the varying levels of compliance between EUmember states as displayed in the more than 6.300 infringement cases in the database. The mainfinding was that the combination of a country's power and the efficiency of its bureaucracy is themost promising account for explaining its record of (non-)compliance. The purpose of the qualitativeanalysis is to complement these findings by conducting comparative case-studies. studies. Firstly,this allows us to further discussing the pertinence of our quantitative findings by analyzing towhich extent the correlations are present in our cases and, more importantly, by revealing theunderlying causal mechanisms. Secondly, we are able to test hypotheses which are hardly quantifiable.Finally, by analyzing compliance with individual rules, we can also include hypotheseswhich draw on rule-specific features for explaining non-compliance problems.Drawing on case studies on the implementation of the Habitats directive (HD) in France, theUnited Kingdom (UK) Italy, and Greece, this paper argues that government capacity is the mostimportant factor for explaining a country's compliance record, but that we also have to considerthe role of non-state actors in determining a state's capacity to comply. It also puts forward therole of domestic legal culture in mitigating the power of a state to not comply. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]