Making Sense of Coherence in Policy Success and Failure: Designing and Implementing Rail Franchising Policy in the UK, Germany and Italy

More than twenty years ago, the European Commision's directive no. 440/1991 introduced a new institutional framework dedicated to open up the vertically-integrated national railway systems, pushing them to integrate each other into a wider single EU railway market, through the diffusion of common operational standards. Despite the huge amount of regulation affecting different aspects of the sector, the discretion upon some relevant issues of liberalization still remains in the hand of each member states. As a matter of fact, the decision on wheather national or regional routes have to be regulated by competitive mechanisms is currently up to the national governments. This paper compares the policy design of railway reforms in the UK, Germany and Italy. These countries have in common a legacy of national monopoly and reforms which introduced a market-oriented policy regime. Despite this common agenda, each implementation process showed both intended and non-intended consequences. The UK and Germany performed relatively well, as rail users significantly increased and competitive tendering effectively took place. The case of Italy, on the contrary, can be understood as a failure, since rail passenger proved to be stagnating over time and tendering process, although compulsory, collapsed due to the lack of capacity of regional administrations. Based on document analysis and interviews with policy makers, the study focuses on the impact of policy design on outcomes and policy effectiveness. The three cases are particularly appropriate because all introduced the same instruments based on both “on track competition” and “franchising”. The analysis concludes that, more than the type of tools, policy effectiveness depends more on how they have been mixed and calibrated.