2 The Emergence and Evolution of EU-Related Implementation Research

Scholars studying European integration, like their colleagues interested in domestic politics, have long been preoccupied with issues of policy formation and decision-making, thus neglecting the question of how policies are being put into practice. At both levels, it was ambitious legislative reform initiatives that spurred interest in policy execution. “Classical” domestic implementation research had its starting point mainly in two countries: the United States and Germany. In the US, Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” project of the 1960s, a package of federal initiatives aimed at combating poverty and racial discrimination, fuelled a set of research projects on the implementation of federal programmes (see e.g. Derthick 1972 ; Pressman and Wildavsky 1973 ; Bardach 1977 ). In Germany, the same effect was brought about by the bold reform initiatives of the grand coalition and the ensuing social-liberal government in the late 1960s and 1970s (Mayntz 1977 , 1979 , 1980 , 1983 ; Scharpf 1978 ). Starting from these pioneer studies, domestic implementation research has produced a raft of mainly case-study based contributions. Most of this research revolved around the cleavage between two schools of thought: the top-down approach, which conceived of implementation as hierarchical execution of centrally-defined policy intentions, and the bottom-up camp, which emphasised instead that policies were decisively shaped by the everyday problem-solving strategies of the actors involved in policy delivery. A third group of scholars tried to bridge the gap between these opposing approaches by combining insights from both sides (for an overview, see Pülzl and Treib 2006 ).

2.1 The First Wave: Implementation and Institutional Efficiency
2.2 The Second Wave: Misfit and More
2.3 The Third Wave: Theoretical and Methodological Differentiation