9 - Comparative assessment: the explanatory value of institutions

Summary

The previous chapters analysed the administrative impact of EU environmental policy from a country-based perspective; they were based on the separate investigation of distinctive European policies for each country. It is the intention of this chapter to assess the validity of our modified institutionalist framework from a comparative perspective. It is on the basis of this assessment, that we are able to understand the extent to which Europeanisation has implied administrative convergence or divergence with respect to administrative styles and structures in German and British environmental policy.

European adaptation pressure and patterns of domestic change

The cross-country and cross-policy assessment of administrative transformation underlines the need for a more differentiated institutional approach which explicitly seeks to reduce the deterministic and conservatist bias inherent to ‘simple’ institution-based explanations, expecting administrative adaptation in cases of sectoral ‘fit’ and non-adaptation in cases of sectoral ‘misfit’.

To avoid the problem of explanatory determinism, we have to rely on a more differentiated conception of European adaptation pressure which distinguishes different levels of institutional incompatibility, namely, whether European policy demands are in contradiction with institutionally strongly embedded core patterns of national administrations or whether administrative adjustment is still possible within the range of options defined by this macro-institutional context. Defining the institutional scope of European adaptation pressure in such a way, we are able to specify the explanatory relevance of institutions as independent variables, i.e., how much institutions matter in order to account for patterns of administrative change.