Introduction
An increased resistance to antibiotics is a serious risk to human health . As Keiji Fukuda, the Assistant Director-General for Health Security of the World Health Organization, pointed out in April 2014, âwithout urgent, coordinated action by many stakeholders, the world is headed for a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries which have been treatable for decades can once again kill.â1 One major way in which antibiotic resistances emerge and travel to human consumers is when too many antibiotics are given to livestock in intensive farming. To address this problem in the European single market for food products, the European Union (EU) has adopted several measures. For example, the EU restricts the use of antibiotics given to animals to the amount needed for one treatment.2 However, in 2011, different countries have interpreted this rule in strikingly diverse ways. In Germany , the use of antibiotics was restricted to seven days; in Austria, to one month; and France and the United Kingdom (UK) simply adopted the EU wording without specifying a time limit. Thus, eating meat or eggs might be more or less safe depending on the country in which the rule has been interpreted. This book conceptualizes the outcomes of this process of interpretation, labelled âcustomizationâ, and analyzes its patterns, causes and consequences, using the example of food safety policy in five Western European countries.
The story told here started with a commissioned research project conducted for the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health in 2010â2011, in which I participated (Sager et al. 2011). Since 2009, Switzerland and the EU have formed a common European veterinary space. In light of the new contractual obligations to the EU, the Swiss administration hired a multilingual team of researchers from the University of Bern tasked with identifying the extent to which Swiss veterinary legislation was equivalent to the relevant EU law. We were also asked to describe how the rules were implemented in four member states similar to Switzerland and to describe the debates and problems surrounding the implementation of those rules. The results were striking: even though we could not identify a single instance in which a country did not comply with EU law,3 the veterinary drugs regulations in the five countries were so different that it was not straightforward to conceptualize what we found as a âcommon European veterinary spaceâ. I became interested in finding a systematic way of comparing the domestic rules with the EU template. This was the beginning of an intellectual journey through various strands of literature, from policy implementation and Europeanization to regulatory change and policy design and evaluation , during which the concept of customization (Thomann 2015) was born.4
As the focus is on customization, this is hence not a compliance study. Instead, it is a study of how countries use their discretion to adapt EU Directives to domestic contexts during transposition, why that happens, and what it implies for policy outcomes. It is driven by an intellectual curiosity to understand how rules change when they are implemented, and a practical interest in how that affects the ways in which policy problems are addressed. In other words, it is a comparative case study of food safety policy implementation in the EU, written in part with the interest of a policy evaluator.
In this first chapter, I argue that it is important to adopt this latter perspective for at least three reasons. First, discretion in policy implementation is crucial for what Marsh and McConnell (2010) call programmatic policy success: effectiveness, efficiency and resilience. However, the role of discretion continues to be contested among scholars and practitioners alike. Second, some member states use the implementation stage to change distant EU decisions (Knill 2015). The relevance of discretion for policy success thus becomes particularly salient if we think of the EU as the joint governance of complex, cross-border policy problems. Third, in order to understand this relevance, it is necessary to move beyond the question of non-compliance and account for the more fine-grained differences in implementation. Otherwise, we miss an important part of the picture.
I will now discuss different views on discretion, conformance and performance in implementation theory. The next section links these notions to problem-solving in the EUâs multilevel system. Based on this, I outline how customization captures diversity in policy implementation beyond legal compliance . Finally, I provide an outline of the different chapters of the book and the questions they address.
Policy Implementation and Discretion
Public policies are designed to resolve various societal
problems, such as ensuring food safety (Lowi
1972; Patton
1997). Policy scholars often think of the policy
process as a cycle with different stages, ranging broadly from definition of problem, agenda-setting and
policymaking to implementation and
evaluation (Jann and Wegrich
2007). Albeit a (contested and simplistic) heuristic, this perspective reminds us that just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, any policy is only as good as its implementation in practice (Pressman and Wildavsky
1984; Robichau and Lynn
2009). To put it with Treib (
2014, p. 5):
policy implementation thus refers to âwhat happens after a bill becomes a lawâ (Bardach 1977) or, as one scholar aptly put it, to the process of âtranslating policy into actionâ. (Barrett 2004, p. 251)
A policy
âon paperâ tells us about intentions and plans to resolve a problem; the policy
âin actionâ (Versluis
2007) tells us about how the problem was actually resolved.
As Mark Thatcher and David Coen (2008, p. 806) note, âimplementation of public policies always raises questions of discretion and diversity.â The implementation process itself consists of various stages. For example, in multilevel systems like the EU, a centrally-decided policy is first transposed by member states (but is still âon paperâ) before it is put into practice by both administrative actors (e.g., food safety inspectors) as well as societal players (e.g., food producers)âsee Chap. 6. During all these stages, policymaking essentially goes on (Lipsky 1980). Policy implementers inherently have discretion, that is, a certain degree of freedom to act. As a result, the policy in action frequently deviates from the policy on paper, especially when implementation processes are multi-stage and multilevel (Bauer and Ege 2016; Hill and Hupe 2014; Hupe et al. 2016; Maggetti and Verhoest 2014).
Scholars and practitioners of policy implementation agree that common policy problems only begin to be effectively resolved once policies are put into practice (Treib 2014). However, they have always held contradictory views on the relevance and desirability of discretion for policy implementation (Berman 1978; Hill and Hupe 2014; Huber and Shipan 2002; Hupe and Hill 2018; Knill 2015; PĂźlzl and Treib 2006; Sabatier 1986). Accordin...
