Judicial Governance In Turbulent Times? Coordinating Adaptation to European Judgments on Environmental Infringements

In this paper, I assess the national adaptation of judgments by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on infringements of environmental legal obligations over time, aiming to capture temporal dynamics due to turbulence. I start from the observation that damage to the environment is increasing in times of turbulence (Galaz 2022), for example the growing backlash from populist regimes against protective measures (Dauvergne and Shipton 2023), or fundamental shifts in environmental politics like the European Green Deal (Leiren and Farstad 2024) and its transition to the Clean Industrial Deal. However, effective protection of the environment depends on functioning governance (Ansell et al. 2024), including of the European judicial system (Adam et al. 2019). Adaptation to European court judgments on ongoing infringement proceedings might thus be affected by how different types of turbulence combine with other important conditions such as political preferences and ideology, or institutional capacities and complexity. Systematic insights on how EU member states adapt specifically to court judgments on infringements are rare, creating a gap in the literature: Which conditions are sufficient for the adaptation of CJEU judgments on environmental infringements in turbulent times? To answer this question, turbulence is theorized as an endogenous temporal mechanism underlying environmental governance, ‘a new normal’ that occurs at different time periods, and integrated into a formalized concept structure (Goertz 2020) alongside other conditions for adaptation over time. The empirical analysis rests on data from the IUROPA CJEU Database (Fjelstul 2024) and covers court judgments until 2023. I will assess periods of turbulence that have emerged from crises ranging from the energy crisis in the early 2000s to the pandemic in the early 2020s (Dobbs et al. 2021). I employ both case-multiplying (Corcaci 2024) and time-differencing (Niikawa and Corcaci 2024) Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to unveil the role of turbulence in CJEU-member state coordination dynamics. A key insight is that different periods of turbulence might facilitate or impede adaptation in combination with other conditions, making it a configurational phenomenon.