Subject:
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Europeanization of Policy and Law (EUROPAL) |
Organization:
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Milieu maatschappijwetenschappen |
Journal title:
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Environmental Policy and Governance
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Abstract:
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Throughout the legal and practical implementation of the European Union (EU) Water
Framework Directive (WFD), subnational implementing agents experience how this policy
works in practice. The feedback, or reloading, of these experiences is an important
contribution to create resilient EU water governance and to further elaborate the flexible
requirements of this framework directive. However, a gap exists concerning our
knowledge on the strategies that implementing actors use to mobilize experiential
knowledge. Our objective is therefore to understand the reloading of implementation
experiences in the WFD's policy process, by studying the conditions that affect strategic
mobilization behavior of implementing agents. We build upon existing studies to
explore which mobilization strategies are used in WFD reloading cases, and assess
which conditions contribute to the identified strategic agency choices. The main finding
of this study is that the mobilizing agents often use a smart combination of framing,
coalition‐building, venue shopping and timing strategies for reloading implementation
experiences as policy‐relevant knowledge. The choice of such combinations is affected
by agency and institutional structure‐related conditions, that is, a mobilizing agent's
interests, resources and capacities plus the existing EU water governance network contribute
to strategic mobilization behavior. Our study is a first exploration of the topic.
We therefore conclude this paper with some suggestions for further research.
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