Judicial Governance in Turbulent Times

Protecting the environment is a global undertaking not confined to the borders of nation states. Damage to nature and people alike from industrial activity and environmental disasters can result from non-implementation of legal obligations or lead to conflicts that reach across territorial levels of governance. In the European Union (EU), such issues are resolved through dialogue mechanisms like the EU Pilot, infringement proceedings by the European Commission, and judgements by the Court of Justice (CJEU). Decisions stemming from these processes or negotiated settlements may emerge over time but eventually require national adaptation of some form. Questions of compliance, implementation, and enforcement have a long-standing tradition in political science and law. While the implementation of directives has received much attention, less work has been done on infringement proceedings, especially at the judicial stage. Moreover, theorizing tends to be neglected compared to empirical case studies and statistical or legal analyses. This is particularly relevant for European environmental law, which accounts for nearly 58% of infringement cases before the CJEU as of December 2025. This study addresses these gaps theoretically by developing an integrated framework that synthesizes enforcement and management approaches with turbulence as a mechanism of change, and empirically by analyzing conditions for national adaptation to CJEU judgments on environmental infringements over time using temporal Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). As a fundamental shift in environmental politics, the European Green Deal and its ongoing transformation into the Clean Industrial Deal have created a new period of turbulence in the EU. Amid increasing damage to the environment and natural habitats in times of turbulence and growing backlash from populist governments, right-wing groups, and industry against protective measures, understanding when countries adapt to court judgments is crucial to protect the environment. However, effective protection of the environment depends on functioning governance, including of the European judicial system. Systematic insights on how EU member states adapt specifically to court judgments on infringement cases are lacking, creating a gap in the literature: Which conditions are sufficient for the adaptation of CJEU judgments on environmental infringements in turbulent times? To address this question, ideological (integration attitudes and political polarization) and institutional (fragmentation and complexity) conditions are derived from the enforcement and management approaches, while acknowledging the Commission’s evolving enforcement strategy. At the same time, 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. The empirical analysis rests on data from the European Commission infringement decisions database and covers court judgments until 2023. The study assesses periods of turbulence that have emerged from the energy crisis in the early 2000s to the pandemic in the early 2020s. A cross-case comparison using time-differencing QCA is conducted to unravel CJEU-member state dynamics and the underlying temporality due to turbulence, supplemented by within-case evidence on deviant cases. A key insight is that ideological and institutional conditions combine in different ways across time to be sufficient for adaptation, making it a configurational phenomenon.