Of EU waste and national garbage cans: How national lead ministerial departments transpose EU waste directives

EU member states comply with EU law to varying degrees and customize the content of EU policies in the national context. While the policy analysis literature has gained valuable knowledge about different stages of the policy cycle focusing on political and interest group influences to explain variation in policy output, the policy formulation stage and ministerial departments as key organizational actors in the drafting process have received much less scholarly attention. Although the political role of bureaucracy in policymaking is rarely contested, bureaucratic influence on policymaking remains an important research gap. This concerns, in particular, the organizational preferences of ministerial departments and organizational decision-making in preparation of a policy proposal. Building on new institutional theory and the garbage can model of organizational decision-making, this paper asks under what conditions lead ministerial departments propose permissive or restrictive transposition of EU Directives. It focuses on organizational decision-making in the lead ministerial department as the potentially most influential and relevant unit of analysis during policy formulation and therefore does not claim to explain the policy output of transposition. Organizational structure, expertise, politicization, and the institutional environment are identified as the main institutional factors of organizational decision-making regarding policy formulation in ministerial departments. Fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is applied to study empirically the interaction of these factors in policymaking looking at the transposition of EU waste directives across EU member states as a most-likely case of strong bureaucratic influence on policymaking. The identified mechanisms of organizational decision-making in transposition might inform further research on organizational influences on multi-level policy implementation. Shedding light on organizational and institutional factors in policymaking, this paper contributes to the academic debates on organizational decision-making in Public Administration, the political role of bureaucracy and policy implementation in the context of multi-level administration.