It’s the polity of implementation: Is Greece a typical case of an environmental laggard state?

The paper analyses the environmental performance of Greece by mapping and explaining the infringements of EU environmental directives over the period 2000-2022. Greece was strategically chosen as being simultaneously an extreme and a critical case. Having had an unusually high number of recorded infringements, Greece can provide useful information about the dynamics of environmental policy implementation inside environmental laggards in the European Union. As a critical case, it can either confirm or falsify the hypothesis that infringements are caused by external crises. If the number of environmental infringements in Greece is not linked to its triple mega crisis -global economic crisis, debt crisis, and bailout programmes, and the COVID-19 pandemic-, then we could argue this cannot be the case for other similar cases. To intensively study Greece as an environmental laggard we collected a diverse range of information from various sources. First, we studied the record of environmental infringements in the period 2000-2022. Second, we studied all implementation reports published by the European Union during the stated period. Third, we conducted 42 in-depth elite interviews with policy-makers and key environmental governance actors in Greece. Our analysis falsifies the crisis hypothesis and shows that Greece is a laggard because of problems in the ‘polity of implementation’. The polity of implementation consists of the institutional and organizational ‘implementation arrangements’ that are exogenous to formal policy decisions and provide the enabling or restraining context in which a policy must reach its goals, as well as the competences and resources of the implementing agents.