What You See is What You Want: The Evolution of Monitoring Networks for Water Quality in Europe.

Environmental monitoring by governments and their agents offers unique opportunities for studying processes of international policy diffusion because it is associated with discrete choices that are clearly identifiable in space and time. Besides, effective monitoring is essential for effective environmental policy. We describe and explain the evolution of one of the most important international environmental monitoring networks in Europe, the one for water quality, in the time-period 1965-2005. Drawing on data from the European Environment Agency and other sources we use a geographic information system to construct a dataset that contains information on the location of several thousand active monitoring stations across the continent. We then examine whether and to what extent the evolution of this monitoring network is driven by domestic factors (e.g., political system, income, trade openness) and network / interdependency effects (e.g., involvement in international policy-making networks, EU membership, behavior of other countries). In this preliminary version of the paper we review the relevant literature and outline the hypotheses to be tested. We also report on how the dataset was constructed and present some preliminary results. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]