Brakeman rather than Entrepreneur: The Changing Role of the European Commission in EU Environmental Policy-Making

Research on policy dismantling has largely neglected the supranational level due to the expansionist nature of the European Union (EU) system. Yet, political claims to slow down, halt or even reverse the expansion of EU’s regulatory scope has altered this premise in the aftermath of the most recent economic crisis. Thus, this paper aims to extend our state of knowledge beyond theoretical expectations and mere political rhetoric. In order to do so, we provide an encompassing longitudinal analysis of EU policy outputs from 1980 to 2014 in the area of clean air and water protection policy. We find that active policy dismantling is highly exceptional and that continuous policy expansion was the dominant pattern of EU environmental policy over the last two decades. However, the analysis also unveiled that the EU has entered an exceptionally long four-year period of almost complete regulatory inactivity after the year 2010. Thus, the observed patterns reveal a picture of passive policy dismantling by default. The European Commission largely accounts for this shift as it significantly decreased the number of new and ambitious policy proposals.