European Policy Analysis最新文献

For energy transition, infrastructure construction is often indispensable but also contested and potentially problematic for social cohesion. Through a game theoretical lens, we examine the basic configuration of infrastructure conflicts. Informed by the empirical example of German electricity grid planning, we discuss three approaches to resolve multilevel infrastructure conflicts, (1) technocratic decision-making, (2) participatory decision-making, and (3) redistribution and compensation, as well as the conditions under which we can expect them to mitigate conflicts. Each of the three approaches has been tried out in German grid planning over time, which allows us to analyze whether the respective conditions were met and why the approaches were (not) able to resolve existing conflicts. We demonstrate that enduring conflicts in German grid expansion are not caused by a fundamentally ill-defined decision-making procedure but rather by a particularly “wicked” conflict structure that can hardly be resolved within planning procedures.

An emerging literature argues that street-level bureaucrats can develop and advocate for policy innovations that change policy in meaningful ways, calling this phenomenon “street-level policy entrepreneurship.” This argument is at the heart of the present special issue, which features contributions to developing the theoretical underpinnings of street-level policy entrepreneurship and empirically examining evidence for this phenomenon. While the traditional understanding of street-level bureaucrats views them as administrative functionaries, lacking motivation or resources for innovation, this new perspective recognizes that street-level officials' deep knowledge of a given policy domain and involved stakeholders uniquely positions these officials to advocate for policy innovations affecting the domain and its constituents. We urge scholars to take street-level policy entrepreneurship seriously and to examine questions at the frontiers of our knowledge about these entrepreneurial officials, including what motivates them, what strategies for policy advocacy they find most effective, and how their behaviors are shaped by different institutional contexts.

Digital technology is frequently used in the delivery of public services. Since not everyone has the skills or digital access required to use such digital services, street-level bureaucrats must find new ways to support citizens to be able to enhance digital inclusion. In most public settings, these new practices of digital support need to be developed in parallel with the street-level bureaucrats' ordinary assignments. This article analyses the development of street-level bureaucrats' entrepreneurial and innovative practices in promoting digital inclusion in two spheres: conventional welfare service provision and in a project-based welfare service provision initiative explicitly intended to enhance digital inclusion. The article builds on qualitative case studies in municipalities in Sweden and demonstrates that there are more openings for innovative, entrepreneurial solutions among street-level bureaucrats in the more project-based setting than in the conventional welfare services. This implies that context matters for street-level entrepreneurial approaches.

Recently, the authorities in Lagos have implemented policies progressively restricting the operation of okadas (motorcycle taxis). We analyze the enforcement of these measures through the lens of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) and street-level policy entrepreneurs (SLPEs). Doing so, we introduce two novel features into the literature. First, the extant literature focuses primarily on policies that deliver public services, whereas policies can also control proscribed behavior. We refer to these as service delivery and regulation, respectively. Second, the exercise of discretion by SLBs and SLPEs can result in both “underenforcement” and “overenforcement” of regulatory policies, the latter potentially involving breaking the law. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Lagos between 2021 and 2023, we find strong evidence of both underenforcement and overenforcement of okada bans over time, but with more overenforcement. This offers important insights conceptually for the SLPE literature and empirically to the challenges of policing urban Lagos.

This article studies how the prolonged pandemic situation impacted crisis governance in the federalized governance system of Switzerland. It examines how in this acute crisis situation, the responsibility for decision-making fluctuated among governance levels, placing subnational states in a situation of uncertainty that caused a fragmented crisis management, and therefore suboptimal policy learning processes. The study is based on the case of COVID-19 governance in Switzerland, where, as in many other European countries, the management of the first pandemic wave was very centralized. However, the federal government avoided taking a strong lead during the subsequent waves. Consequently, pandemic management was marked by numerous fluctuations regarding who was in charge of the main COVID-19 decisions between the federal and subnational governance levels. A media analysis (February 2020–March 2022) and an analysis of the gray literature show that crisis governance and policy learning processes were scattered across levels of governance, which impeded the accumulation of knowledge and know-how. The article analyses how crises can give way to blame games between the levels of governance, thus hampering a coordinated crisis management and policy learning processes across the different stages of the pandemic.

Laws are only as good as their enforcement. International treaties are no exception. We investigate how Germany implements international wildlife protection treaties, namely the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora and the Bern Convention. We find that Germany's federal system allows for uneven enforcement of national legislation across the 16 federal states. We utilize Policy Feedback Theory as a theoretical lens to examine how federalism (re-)produces different enforcement regimes. We rely on qualitative analysis of interviews of German street-level bureaucrats, government officials, and NGO representatives. We find that macrolevel context impacts how institutions enforce wildlife protection policies. Particularly, Germany's federal structure permits either centralized, decentralized, or cooperative arrangements that result in differences in resources, affecting the ways bureaucrats view their roles and responsibilities. These resource and interpretive effects further feedback into the contextual structure of the federal enforcement system.

This article examines the paradigm shifts in the European Union's (EU's) climate policy from 2009 to 2022 looking closer at the main policy instrument of EU's climate policy, the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). The paradigm shifts of the EU ETS are linked to the climate policy paradigms prometheanism/growth unlimited (PGU), ecological modernization (EM), and sufficiency. The question of how ideas have shaped EU climate policy and the EU ETS in the past decade is answered, with the establishment of the EM paradigm and moving toward the sufficiency paradigm. There is a need for more research looking closer at how this paradigm shift impacts legislation for climate policy going forward.

The Council of Ministers is still the European Union's decision-making center in migration policy. However, we know little about the determinants of member state's policy positions. This article tests three hypotheses: member state positions might be influenced by socioeconomic conditions, by public opinion, or by partisan preferences. We conduct a quantitative analysis of two legislative proposals at the intersection of migration and welfare policy (the returns directive, COD/2005/167 and the social security regulation, 2016/0397/COD) using member state positions as the dependent variable. The result is that different factors are important for positioning on the two proposals: member state positions on the returns directive are correlated with public opinion, while their positions on the social security regulation are correlated with party positions, especially the position of the economically rightmost coalition partner. Thus, our study takes issue with the argument that migration politics in the Council are disconnected from the domestic arena.