Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Börzel, Tanja A.; Heidbreder, Eva G. --- "Enforcement and compliance" [2017] ELECD 422; in Harlow, Carol; Leino, Päivi; della Cananea, Giacinto (eds), "Research Handbook on EU Administrative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 241

Book Title: Research Handbook on EU Administrative Law

Editor(s): Harlow, Carol; Leino, Päivi; della Cananea, Giacinto

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784710675

Section: Chapter 10

Section Title: Enforcement and compliance

Author(s): Börzel, Tanja A.; Heidbreder, Eva G.

Number of pages: 22

Abstract/Description:

This chapter offers a political scientific perspective on the enforcement of and compliance with European Union (EU) law. The European Union is the most legalized international institution in the world. It has more than 34,000 laws on the books, which take primacy over national law. To enforce the acquis communautaire, the EU has developed a comprehensive set of administrative and legal procedures to ensure effective implementation and monitor and sanction non-compliance. Yet, while the Member States are bound by EU law the EU has no centralized enforcement power to coerce them into compliance. The first part of the chapter outlines the peculiar context of enforcement and compliance in a multilevel system that is more than an international organization but less than a federal state (Section 2). To grasp the role of administrative law for enforcement and compliance in the peculiar context of the EU, political science offers two principal approaches. The first draws on compliance research in the field of International Relations. It focuses on the administrative and legal mechanisms EU-level actors can invoke to redress Member State non-compliance or to prevent it from occurring in the first place (Section 3). Similar to the so called top-down studies in implementation research, weak enforcement capacities of EU authorities and insufficiently specified EU rules and procedures are seen as the main source of non-compliance. The second approach is close to the bottom-up implementation research in the field of Public Administration and Policy Analysis (Section 4).