ABSTRACT
Introduction Although this book is primarily focused on the making of international policies, the ‘proof of the pudding’ lies in effective and successful national implementation. Hence, this chapter will make a first, modest cut in terms of assessing the prospects for successful implementation. As substantial cuts in emissions will be required of many countries, the potential environmental improvement will be significant. Moreover, it has generally been suggested that stronger commitments will easily be followed by weaker implementation (cf. e.g. Downs, Rocke and Barsoom 1996). Hence, the topic is of considerable political and theoretical interest.With regard to the four main substances focused on in recent EU and CLRTAP policy-making (i.e. S02, NOx, VOCs, NH3), there are certain key countries in terms of size of emissions and contributions to transboundary effects - and hence also a number of countries whose performance matters only marginally. Take S02, NOx and VOC emissions:319 according to ECE/ CLRTAP (1999) regarding S02 emissions, the six largest European emitters in 1995 were Poland, the UK, Germany, Spain, Bulgaria, and Italy.320 With regard to NOx, the top five 1995 emitters were the UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain.321 Regarding VOC emissions, the top five on which data existed in 1995/96 were as follows: France, Italy, the UK, Germany, and Spain.322Looking at these various groups, certain key countries stand out, first and foremost the UK, Germany, Italy and France. Is there one ‘really key’ country? Norwegians and Swedes would probably point at the British, given the ‘vulnerable, net-importer not least from the UK’ position of the Scandinavians. The UK, being a big emitter, is a generally interesting
country, with its past ‘dirty man of Europe’ image and record of international stubbornness.323 This is then the background for the question posed in the title of this chapter: Will the high hopes of emissions reductions in Brussels/EU and Geneva/CLRTAP be ‘dashed’ in London? In addition to the UK, the two other central countries France and Germany and their implementation prospects are singled out for closer scrutiny in this context.This does not, however, mean that the performance of the other countries is of no importance or interest. For instance, several of the Eastern European countries are high emitters, and their prospects in terms of air pollution policy takes on added interest in the context of the EU enlargement process. As pinpointed by EU Environment Commissioner Wallstrom in the wake of the common position on the NEC Directive in June 2000, ‘the “NEC” agreement sets an important environmental benchmark for negotiations with candidate countries in the enlargement process’.324In order to understand a country’s past level of compliance, three main analytical perspectives have been suggested: First, what may be termed ‘basic interests’, related to the relationship between abatement costs and damage costs; second, ‘domestic politics’, bringing in not least the societal distribution of costs and benefits; and third, the issue of ‘learning’ and policy diffusion (Underdal 1998). In order to use these perspectives to look forward, the perspectives need to be complemented by a baseline perspective, summing up important achievements and failures so far of the countries in question. On this background, the chapter will be structured in the following manner: The next section will sum up some baseline information about past achievements of the countries singled out, within both the EU and CLRTAP contexts. The third section will form the main part of the chapter, elaborating and discussing the three ‘prospective implementation’ perspectives of interests, politics, and learning. Section four will sum up main findings and provide some concluding comments. ‘The Implementation Baseline’: What has been Achieved so Far? In this context, we can fortunately use a recently published overview of compliance and achievements so far within CLRTAP as a point of departure (ECE/CLRTAP 1999), before adding some notes on the more specific EU context and CLRTAP-EU interplay so far.
