2.1 The First Wave: Implementation and Institutional Efficiency
European integration scholars
discovered the issue of implementation even later than this. Initially, the field focused almost exclusively on
the supranational level. The debate between neo-functionalists and intergovernmentalists in essence revolved
around the question of whether and to what extent nation states were willing to transfer crucial
decision-making competences to the European level. When scholarly attention turned away from
“grand bargains” and macro-level developments to an analysis of everyday decision-making, the
underlying analytical approach did not change fundamentally. When looking at the interactions
between supranational, national, subnational and societal actors in European policy-making,
the focus still lay on the relative influence of these actors in bringing about European policy
solutions.
It was the Single Market Programme that acted as a stepping-stone to implementation studies in the EU
context. The programme involved a raft of legislative measures whose even implementation was seen as a
precondition for the completion and smooth functioning of a Europe-wide market until 1992. In the
mid-1980s, these concerns gave rise to the first wave of EU-related implementation research. In theoretical
terms, the main inspiration came from domestic implementation studies, most importantly from the
top-down school (Pressman and Wildavsky 1973; Bardach 1977; van Meter and van Horn 1975; Sabatier
and Mazmanian 1981; Mazmanian and Sabatier 1983). First-wave studies thus portrayed the domestic
implementation of European law as a rather apolitical process whose success primarily depended on clearly
worded provisions, effective administrative organisation and streamlined legislative procedures at the
domestic level. At the same time, they also absorbed some of the insights of the bottom-up camp
(Lipsky 1980
; Hjern and Porter 1981; Elmore 1982), stressing the need for involving all relevant
domestic actors (such as parliaments, important interest groups, or subnational entities) in the
preparation of the countries’ European negotiating position and for co-ordinating the negotiation and
implementation tasks within domestic administrations, ideally by attaching responsibility for both
phases of the policy cycle to one person (Ciavarini Azzi 1985; Krislov et al. 1986; Siedentopf
and Ziller 1988; Schwarze et al. 1990, 1991, 1993; From and Stava 1993). The absence of a
‘political’ conceptualisation of the implementation process among first-wave studies to some extent
may be explained by the disciplinary background of the authors, who mainly came from legal
studies and administrative science. This disciplinary background is also the reason why some
contributions with a first-wave focus continued to be published even after the research mainstream
had moved on to other theoretical shores (Demmke 1994, 1998, 2001; Pappas 1995; van den
Bossche 1996; Ciavarini Azzi 2000; Bursens 2002).
Most of the first-wave studies covered transposition as well as application and enforcement. However, the
authors did not draw a sharp distinction between legal incorporation and the later stages of the
implementation process. Instead, the main explanatory variables for all stages were clearly stated policy
objectives and the availability of a well-organised state apparatus. With regard to enforcement and
application, the main conclusion was that “Community law, once it has been incorporated, is applied
neither better nor worse than national law” (Ciavarini Azzi 1988: 199) since “street-level bureaucrats”
(Lipsky 1980) and target actors are usually unaware of the European origins of a particular
transposition law. However, the analysis of the domestic implementation of regulations revealed
that specific problems occurred since the one-size-fits-all rules enshrined in EU regulations
could not be adapted to specific domestic circumstances and traditions (Ciavarini Azzi 1988:
199).
