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EUROPEAN UNION
POLICY-MAKING
THE REGULATORY SHIFT IN
NATURAL GAS MARKET P OLICY
NICOLE HERWEG
Series Editors
B. Guy Peters
Pittsburgh University, Pittsburgh, USA
Philippe Zittoun
Research Professor of Political Science, LET-ENTPE,
University of Lyon, Lyon, France
The International Series on Public Policy - the official series of International
Public Policy Association, which organizes the International Conference on
Public Policy - identifies major contributions to the field of public policy,
dealing with analytical and substantive policy and governance issues across a
variety of academic disciplines. A comparative and interdisciplinary venture,
it examines questions of policy process and analysis, policymaking and
implementation, policy instruments, policy change & reforms, politics and
policy, encompassing a range of approaches, theoretical, methodological,
and/or empirical. Relevant across the various fields of political science,
sociology, anthropology, geography, history, and economics, this cutting
edge series welcomes contributions from academics from across disciplines
and career stages, and constitutes a unique resource for public policy
scholars and those teaching public policy worldwide.
European Union
Policy-Making
The Regulatory Shift in Natural Gas Market Policy
Nicole Herweg
Institute of Political Science
University of Heidelberg
Heidelberg, Germany
This book would not have evolved into its present form without the support
and input from colleagues and reviewers. First of all, my grateful thanks go to
Reimut Zohlnh€ ofer, my doctoral supervisor, whose advice and never-wavering
encouragement have substantially contributed to me completing this book.
Furthermore, I was blessed with the opportunity to discuss my research at
different stages at workshops and panels dedicated to the multiple streams
framework in the last three years. I am very thankful for the many insightful and
thought-provoking comments and suggestions I received on these occasions.
From these scientific exchanges resulted research projects and collabora-
tions, which had a strong impact on my understanding of the multiple
streams framework and, consequently, on this book. In this regard, I am
particularly grateful to Nikolaos Zahariadis, Michael D. Jones, once again,
Reimut Zohlnh€ ofer, Jale Tosun, and Christian Huss.
I also thank my colleagues at the Institute of Political Science at the Univer-
sity of Heidelberg, Germany, for their constant encouragement and support,
above all Kathrin Dümig and Fabian Engler. Last but not least, I would like to
thank Jemima Warren for her guidance and very pleasant cooperation, James
Farrell for language editing, and Svenja Bauer-Blaschkowski and Philipp Mai for
assistance with the manuscript. Any shortcomings in this book remain my sole
responsibility.
vii
CONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Empirical Research Questions 6
1.2 Research Design, Method, and Contribution to the Literature 8
1.3 The Structure of the Book 13
References 17
ix
x CONTENTS
7 Conclusion 229
7.1 Empirical Findings 229
7.2 Theoretical Findings 232
7.2.1 Advantages of the Multiple Streams Framework 233
7.2.2 Agenda Change 236
7.2.3 Policy Change 240
References 246
Index 259
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
xiii
xiv LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
Fig. 1.1 Share of natural gas consumption in the gross inland consumption
in the European Union, 1970–2010 4
Fig. 1.2 European natural gas import dependency, 1990–2012 5
Fig. 2.1 Kingdon’s multiple streams framework 26
Fig. 2.2 The modified multiple streams framework 36
Fig. 2.3 Causality in the modified multiple streams framework 52
Fig. 3.1 Regulatory diversity in the EU15, 1992–2003 86
Fig. 3.2 Regulatory diversity in the EU27, 2004–2009 87
Fig. 5.1 Number of representative offices of natural gas and electricity
sectors at European level, 1993–2003 152
Fig. 6.1 Development of the natural gas price, 1985–2008 190
Fig. 6.2 Supported measures for achieving the IEM according to the
findings of the Green Paper’s public consultation 200
Fig. 7.1 Number of representative offices of natural gas and electricity
sector at European level, 1993–2009 238
Fig. 7.2 Overview of the length of the EU decision-making process 243
xv
LIST OF TABLES
xvii
xviii LIST OF TABLES
Table 5.5 How well the multiple streams framework fares in explaining
how the second gas directive was passed 180
Table 6.1 Main findings of the energy sector inquiry 197
Table 6.2 Main findings of the impact assessment 202
Table 6.3 How well the multiple streams framework fares in explaining
how the third gas directive entered the decision agenda 210
Table 6.4 How well the multiple streams framework fares in explaining
how the third gas directive was passed 220
Table 7.1 Explaining agenda change in EU policy-making by applying the
multiple streams framework 234
Table 7.2 Explaining policy change in EU policy-making by applying the
multiple streams framework 235
Table 7.3 Frequency with which the European Council referred to the
policy process (or the internal energy market) 244
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This book pursues two objectives: First, it addresses the question of how
well the multiple streams framework (MSF)1 is suited for explaining
European Union (EU)2 policy-making in general; and second, it empirically
assesses how well it fares in explaining the regulatory shift in the EU natural
gas market policy between 1998 and 2009. Until the 1990s, the first
question would have been far-fetched, given that it was an established
practice to conduct studies of the EU from an international relations
perspective (Hix 1994). Mirroring the research interests of this perspective,
these studies focused on “understand[ing] how the EU has come about and
which factors made it what it is today” (Lelieveldt and Princen 2011, 32).
The ongoing deepening of European integration, however, has attracted
the attention of public policy scholars, who have since aimed at explaining
how the EU actually functions (Lelieveldt and Princen 2011). As the
publication of a special issue on theoretical frameworks of the EU’s policy
process in the Journal of European Public Policy in 2013 indicates, the idea
to apply theories of public policy and decision-making to political behavior
and action in the EU is fully established today.
In this regard, the MSF put forward by Kingdon (1984) and developed
further by Zahariadis (2003) ranks as one of the “promising frameworks of
the EU policy process” (Zahariadis 2013, 807). In fact, in recent years,
analytical interest in the framework has increased with regard to applying it
to the EU policy process (Ackrill et al. 2013). The present book contributes
to this strand of literature with a systematic translation of the MSF into a
theory of the EU’s policy process and its modification in a way which allows
for explaining agenda-setting and decision-making.
My main argument is that past MSF applications have not taken suffi-
ciently into account the fact that Kingdon (1984) derived the framework
inductively. This inadequacy, in turn, has resulted in an incomplete transfer
of the MSF to the EU level. Due to the fact that the MSF was derived from
observations of agenda-setting processes in the United States, researchers
face several challenges if they apply the framework to the EU: First, they
must identify functional equivalents of the MSF’s core concepts in the EU;
and second, they must assess empirically whether the assumed causal mech-
anisms also operate at the EU level. Since it is an established practice today
to apply the MSF to agenda-setting and decision-making, it is imperative to
distinguish two sets of causal mechanisms: one explaining agenda change
and another one explaining policy change (Herweg et al. 2015; Howlett
et al. 2015). As will be documented in Chap. 2, these challenges have not
been dealt with systematically in the Multiple Streams literature so far.
Therefore, the present book addresses them one by one and derives a
modified MSF. More precisely, it identifies functional equivalents of the
MSF’s core concepts in the EU’s problem stream, political stream, and
policy stream. Furthermore, it considers two policy windows (agenda win-
dow and decision window) and two different sets of causal mechanisms in
order to explain agenda-setting and decision-making. To make the frame-
work’s necessary conditions more accessible for the empirical assessment,
they are explicitly translated into hypotheses. Summarizing the above, the
book’s overall research questions are these: Which modifications in the MSF
are necessary in order to apply the framework to agenda change and policy
change in the EU? How well do the suggested modifications perform in the
empirical analysis?
It requires tracing the framework’s causal mechanisms leading to agenda
change and policy change in the EU in order to empirically assess how well
the MSF fares in explaining these changes. This calls for analyzing cases in
which the phenomenon occurs (here agenda change and policy change),
because “[t]racing a nonexistent mechanism in a case where we a priori
knew it was not present tells us nothing about how the mechanism works in
cases where it is present” (Beach and Pedersen 2016, 4; in a similar vein, see,
for instance, Bennett and Elman 2006, 462, Braumoeller and Goertz 2000,
846, Dion 2003, 96 and Mahoney and Goertz 2006, 239).
The cases selected to empirically assess the modified MSF are the three
policy processes which led to the EU natural gas directives in 1998, 2003,
INTRODUCTION 3
30
Natural gas in the European energy
25
20
mix in per cent
15 EU15
EU28
10
Fig. 1.1 Share of natural gas consumption in the gross inland consumption in the
European Union, 1970–2010. Source: Own calculation, based on British Petroleum
(2014). Notes: The graph shows the share of natural gas consumption in the gross
inland energy consumption in percentage. There are missing data for EU15 (regard-
ing Luxembourg) and EU28 (regarding Estonia, Croatia, Cyprus, Latvia, Luxem-
bourg, Slovenia, and Malta). On average, these member states‘ share on the EU15’s
and EU28’s natural gas consumptions was only 0.3 percent (EU15) and 1.6 percent
(EU28) between 1990 to 2012. Therefore, the missing data has no impact on the
reported consumption trend (percentage calculated from the European energy
statistics quantities, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/energy/data/main-tables,
last accessed on February 12, 2014)
INTRODUCTION 5
80
Import dependency in % 70
60
50
40 EU15
30 EU28
20
10
Fig. 1.2 European natural gas import dependency, 1990–2012. Source: Own
calculation, based on Eurostat energy statistics quantities (http://ec.europa.eu/
eurostat/web/energy/data/main-tables, last accessed on February 12, 2014).
Notes: The natural gas import dependency is calculated as the ratio of net natural
gas imports to gross inland consumption of natural gas, whereby the net natural gas
imports are natural gas imports minus exports minus stock changes. Due to data
restrictions, the numbers reported cover only the time frame from 1990 to 2012.8
However, since the natural gas era started in the 1960s, the reported shares must
have a positive slope for the time before the 1990s
RQ 1: How did the draft directive leading to the first gas directive gain
agenda status?
RQ 2: Why did not the member states make use of their right to veto in
order to avert this policy change once the gas draft directive
entered the decision-making stage?
Regardless of the lengthy negotiations, the passing of the first gas direc-
tive was not a one-off exercise; in the subsequent nine years, two more gas
directives were passed (2003/55/EC; 2009/73/EC), repealing the previ-
ous one. This high regulatory activity regarding the European natural gas
INTRODUCTION 7
sector is striking because the idea to liberalize this sector was equated with
“the end of civilization” (Stern 1998, 91) in the run-up to the first directive.
Therefore, it is astonishing that natural gas regulation returned on the
decision agenda in the form of a legislative proposal for a second directive
(European Commission 2001) only seven months after the date of trans-
position of the first directive (98/30/EC, Art. 29–30). Given that a time
lag between the implementation of new rules and they taking effect is very
likely, just granting seven months for making an impact before discussing
revised rules seems unrealistic. Although the time lag between the effective
date of the second gas directive and the tabling of the third gas draft
directive (European Commission 2007) was longer (just about three
years), it still did not grant much time for the provisions of the second gas
directive to take full effect. Hence, the book’s third research question is this:
RQ 3: How can the return of the gas directive on the EU decision agenda
in 2001 and 2007 be explained?
8 N. HERWEG
In contrast to the first gas directive, the following ones were of a higher
political complexity. Following Kaeding (2006) and Steunenberg and
Rhinard (2010), the number of recitals in a directive is a good proxy to
estimate the degree of political complexity because member states, the
European Parliament, and the European Commission add recitals in order
to express reservations or to clarify issues. While the first gas directive
contains 32 recitals, there are already 34 recitals in the second one, which
culminates in 66 recitals in the third gas directive. Apart from the political
complexity, the regulatory provisions increased in terms of scope and detail:
Although the number of chapters only increased from seven (first and
second gas directive) to ten (third gas directive), the number of articles
increased from 31 (first gas directive) to 35 (second gas directive), which
finally rose to 56 articles in the third gas directive (see Annexes I and II for
an overview). Although one might assume that an increase in political and
regulatory complexity involves a higher conflict potential, the negotiation
periods were considerably reduced when compared with the first directive
process: The decision-making process took two-and-a-quarter years of
negotiation regarding the second gas directive and less than two years
regarding the third one, while it took six-and-a-half years for the first gas
directive. This leads to the fourth research question:
key European topics, European Voice and Agence Europe, and from the
electronic database of LexisNexis for the period 1987 (a year before the
internal energy market entered the governmental agenda) to 2009 (the
passage of the third gas directive). This was supplemented by available docu-
ments from the European institutions and the relevant secondary literature.
With this research design, the book makes a significant theoretical con-
tribution to the current state-of-the-art literature on the MSF. First, it
applies the framework fully. According to its citation frequency, the MSF
is a widely recognized approach to the study of public policy (Herweg 2013,
322; McLendon and Cohen-Vogel 2008, 31). However, only a few con-
tributions actually applied the framework instead of just citing it (Jones et al.
2016, 9; Herweg 2015, 340). For instance, of all English-language peer-
reviewed journal articles referring to the MSF during 2000 and 2013, only
16 percent actually applied the framework. Nevertheless, of these 16 per-
cent, roughly one-third applied all of the framework’s elements (Jones et al.
2016, 24).12 The vast majority of contributions just referred to individual
concepts, such as policy windows or policy-entrepreneurs (Herweg 2013,
322; Jones et al. 2016, 18). Hence, this book adds a full MSF application to
the literature.
Second, the book explicitly tests the framework’s explanatory power.
Resulting from incomplete applications and the neglect of the framework’s
causal mechanisms, most applications only use it for a structured description
of processes. Put differently, most contributions deliberately do not exploit
the framework’s explanatory potential. This corroborates Radaelli’s finding
that only a few authors have tested Kingdon’s (implicitly stated) assump-
tions (Radaelli 2000, 132). This might be attributable to the fact that the
MSF does not offer a set of ready-made hypotheses (Sabatier 2007a, 327).
Consequently, in order to test the MSF claims rigorously, they have to be
translated into falsifiable hypotheses. Therefore, this contribution derives a
systematic set of falsifiable hypotheses and tests how well the MSF fares in
explaining the policy processes which led to the passing of the three gas
directives.
Since the initial MSF is restricted to the agenda-setting stage, it is
necessary to modify the framework in a way which allows for analyzing
agenda-setting and decision-making. While it is a common practice to apply
the framework to policy stages following the agenda-setting stage (for an
overview, see Herweg 2015, 343–46), the respective contributions usually fall
short of specifying the causal mechanisms for the policy stage(s) considered in
the analysis. This holds particularly true for studies which apply the MSF to
INTRODUCTION 11
Peer-reviewed MSF journal articles published between 2000 and 2013 Contribution
Source: Own compilation based on the dataset gathered by Jones et al. (2016). MSF stands for multiple
streams framework
Web of Knowledge search Results Web of Knowledge search terms Results Results
terms I II
(such as climate policy) or on energy sources other than natural gas. For
instance, the liberalization of the electricity and natural gas sectors was
addressed simultaneously in the EU. The analysis of the electricity sector
has attracted more scientific attention. Whereas the Web of Science data-
bases find 1208 political science contributions dealing with electricity, they
find just 506 contributions dealing with natural gas.16 Of these contribu-
tions, 118 consider a European dimension in their analysis of the electricity
sector (cf. Eising 2002; Levi-Faur 2011; Padgett 2003), while this is true for
only 17 contributions referring to natural gas in their analysis (cf. Bahgat
2006; Schmidt-Felzmann 2011; Talus 2011). In general, contributions that
deal with the natural gas sector tend to either include this sector in a broader
analysis of EU energy policy or focus on security of supply issues. Thereby,
they share common ground with the field of international relations
(cf. Aalto and Temel 2014; Proedrou 2011; Waelde 1996; Westphal
2006). Furthermore, it is common to include the natural gas sector in the
analysis of different governance modes at work in the EU (cf. Eberlein
2008; Levi-Faur 2011; Maggetti and Gilardi 2011; Schmitt and Schulze
2011). Contributions that exclusively deal with natural gas tend to concen-
trate on the output or outcome of the European regulatory activity (cf. Brau
et al. 2010; Growitsch and Stronzik 2014; Haase 2009).
However, policy process research focusing on EU natural gas regulation
is uncommon (for exceptions, see Brutschin 2015; Eberlein 2005; Eikeland
2011). In this context, policy process research is defined as “the study of the
interactions over time between public policy17 and its surrounding actors,
events, and contexts, as well as the policy or policies’ outcomes” (Weible
2014, 5). Put differently, “the emphasis is much more on the unfolding
[of actions, events, and decisions, N.H.] than on the authoritative decision”
(Schlager 2007, 293). Consequently, with the above-introduced research
design, this book contributes to a better understanding of EU policy
processes dealing with natural gas issues.