Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ENVIMP (Environmental resolution mechanisms beyond the nation state. A comparative analysis of the implementation of court judgements and managerial agreements)
Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2025-06-30
The implementation of decisions on European and international environmental obligations are crucial tools to protect the environment from harm. This includes different so-called ‘resolution mechanisms’: court rulings on environmental legal obligations and conflicts as well as managerial decisions from non-compliance or implementation committees. In this context, the MSCA-funded ENVIMP project aims to examine the conditions that contribute to the effective implementation of such decisions. This will be achieved by developing an innovative, theory-driven concept-structural framework that advances the existing management and enforcement approaches. The project will leverage insights from policy implementation research and compare implementation processes across different resolution mechanisms. ENVIMP will gather data from public documents to conduct a temporal Qualitative Comparative Analysis and selected case studies.
The theoretical framework has been developed based on the enforcement and management approaches as well as the concept of intermediaries. The resulting formalised concept structure has been developed. A dataset containing coding values for all conditions and outcomes has been produced. A multi-level temporal configurational analysis using time-differencing QCA has been conducted. Several case studies have been produced.
The concept structure and theoretical framework go beyond the state of the art because they combine insights from policy implementation and intermediaries in a formalised framework that accounts for temporal changes. Several equifinal explanations for effective implementation of European and international environmental obligations have been found, which go beyond the state of the art because the compare decisions from different resolution mechanisms, in particular court judgments and managerial decisions. Further researcch is required to explain deviant cases and to extend the theory to include additional explanatory conditions. Further research is also required to produce more direct empirical evidence.