How the EU Makes Its Legislation Work

Policy delivery is the Achilles heel of EU governance. National implementation, enforcement, compliance and ultimately problem-solving are rife with problems. In light with the topic’s importance, a lot has been written about EU policy delivery over the past three decades. Yet, our knowledge of the nature of these problems, their antecedents, and the strategies to tackle them is still incomplete, scattered and insufficiently cumulative. For this reason, we have embarked on a book project on policy delivery in the European Union. The prospective book sets out to diagnose, theorize and explain the problems with EU policy delivery. To this end, it will develop an integrated theoretical approach, combining theoretical insights from the existing literatures on EU, international, and national compliance and policy implementation. Rather than isolating a single perspective, the book integrates these perspectives into an encompassing, multi-paradigmatic model of policy delivery, focusing on preferences, resources, and ideational variables as the main drivers. On the basis of these insights, we specify the range of instruments for improving policy delivery that can be used in both vertical and horizontal relations, differentiating between the European Commission, other national governments and domestic stakeholders as the main actors who could carry out such improvements. This theoretical model will then be used for an assessment of the instruments for making EU policy work used in reality, and to prepare the ground for extending the toolboxes of key actors in the European multi-level system. Our conference paper presents the theoretical framework and diagnosis of EU policy delivery.