Deliverables Policy lessons for a more effective implementation of environmental directives Based on 12 implementation studies of Directives in different Member States, the result consists in a set of policy lessons, which can help to promote a more environmentally and economically effective implementation of EU environmental legislation. The central lesson is that implementation needs to be adaptive. Given the sample countries studied in the frame of the IMPOL project (France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom), the result is not representative of implementation in the European Union as a whole. It is biased towards �northern� Member States and the case of the Mediterranean countries, which are generally said to exhibit a deeper implementation gap is not covered. Problems encountered at the implementation stage may be due to inadequate implementation procedures, the way in which the policy was formulated, or to the fit between these two aspects. The policy lessons presented here therefore address the overall problem of how to develop more efficient environmental policy. Within this context �policy� is viewed from a particular perspective: that of its practical consequences for implementation bodies and policy targets. It is clearly a challenge to put an environmental policy adopted in Brussels into practice in locations as far apart as Malmo and Porto or London and Athens. In this context, the central lesson of the IMPOL project is the importance of policy interactions. Other environmental and non-environmental policies have huge impacts, both negative and positive, on the environmental outcomes of particular Directives. In this regard, the implementation of environmental Directives is not a top down process, but one piece in a patchwork of policy processes arising at different governance levels (local, national, European, international) and in different policy arenas (environmental and non-environmental). Given that the impacts of such policy interactions are by their nature difficult to anticipate, both policy and its implementation need to be adaptive. Making policy more adaptive means promoting: -Flexibility, leaving polluters free to choose how to adapt to unanticipated changes. -Decentralisation and subsidiary, as decentralised political systems are likely to more easily adapt to unanticipated changes. At the EU level this means developing policies that focus on setting environmental objectives rather than specifying the precise means of achieving those objectives. -Integration of parallel measures in the policy mix. Here, the rationale is to promote synergies and limit inconsistencies between different policy components. At the EU level, this militates for a broadening of the scope of individual Directives. -Policy learning through appropriate monitoring, ex post evaluation and revision mechanisms. Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
