Implementing the EU Ambient Air Quality Directive: Analysis of Differences in the Implementation Performance of Local Governments in the Netherlands

This paper offers a fresh perspective on implementation of EU Ambient Air quality directive by focusing on the implementation performance of Dutch medium sized municipalities. It moves beyond the current top-down compliance approach of EU implementation research to paint a comprehensive picture of implementation performance based on horizontal comparison across municipalities. A closer examination of practical implementation of EU directive, that was anticipated to be troublesome in the implementation, reveals a much more nuanced and positive view on implementation of EU directives. Despite of facing initial implementation challenges in 2005 these Dutch municipalities have managed to reduce air pollution in the cities by undertaking several measures. Legalistically, this already qualifies the municipalities as compliant as they all have air quality policy at place which is also what the directives obliges the implementers to do. The EU compliance research has paid very little attention to such cases of compliance, even less so to the fact that compliant practices still exhibit a great variety in implementation performance. At the same time, it has been argued that non-compliance and compliance with EU directives are not characterised by symmetrical causal mechanisms. Therefore such shortage of systematic attention to the compliant cases is surprising as such analysis sheds light on what could be conducive to a ‘good’ implementation performance. This paper addresses this gap by zooming in on the municipalities that comply with the EU legislation but score very differently on the implementation performance of EU Ambient Air quality directive. The analysis of implementation performance was performed using an innovative three-dimensional conceptual framework. The air quality policy plans, their evaluations and interviews with the policy officers informed the analysis. The six municipalities that score the highest and lowest were selected for in-depth examination of causal mechanisms.