The title of this book is Governing and Governance in France. If modern day France can be geographically located in a precise manner, there is no easy agreement about the concepts of governing, government or governance. Some basic definitions assist conceptual and empirical clarity. For French political scientist Leca (1996) governing ‘is a matter of taking decisions, resolving conflicts, producing public goods, coordinating private behaviour, regulating markets, organising elections, distributing resources, determining spending’. Governing is the core business of government, which claims to speak with an authoritative voice and to embody a superior legitimacy to other interests or forces in society. For Le Galès (2002: 17) government ‘refers to structures, actors, processes and outputs’, while governance ‘relates to all the institutions, networks, directives, regulations, norms, political and social usages, public and private actors that contribute to the stability of a society…’. In this basic framework, governance represents new forms of coordination – or of governing – that go beyond the traditional confines of government. But what is government and how does it exemplify itself in the ‘strong state’ of France?

Governing as government

In the definition given by Le Galès, the four key features of government were identified as structures, actors, processes and outputs. Though there are semantic difficulties with these terms, a credible definition of government must integrate an understanding of each of them. We would add a fifth variable: namely institutions, a central component that provides meaning between structures and actors.

More than anything else, the success of the concept of Europeanisation in recent years is due to the realisation that EU policy has become domestic policy, with 80 per cent of all policy sectors influenced in one way or another by the Union. Such processes might better be described as ‘EUisation’, in so far as they refer to the impact of the institutions, actors and policies of the European Union on its member states. But most scholars prefer to reason in terms of Europeanisation and to avoid the unattractive phraseology of the alternative term (Börzel 2002; Featherstone and Radaelli 2004; Bulmer and Lequesne 2005). Among the various definitions of Europeanisation, a distinction is usually drawn between top-down and bottom-up processes. For Saurugger (2007) top-down Europeanisation can best be understood as a continuum at three levels: adaptation, inertia and resistance. Adaptation of preferences to the perceived requirements of integration is the strongest form of Europeanisation. There has been a proliferation of work looking at the domestic effects of European integration on political (typically executive) structures and on public policies. Inertia signifies the absence of any causal relationship between European-level and domestic change (Börzel 2002). Paradigmatic policy change, or changing relations between the state and non-state actors, for example, might have nothing to do with EU-level processes. Rejection is much stronger. Social movement and party actors use an anti-EU discourse to shape their own strategies, while policy-makers resist unwelcome developments in European integration by all means at their disposal.

As a leading European nation with a particular state tradition and historical legacy, France has long fascinated observers. The title of this book is Governing and Governance in France. Such a title presupposes that the study of single countries is a legitimate, indeed central dimension of the study of European politics. Some comparativists would contest this claim (Dogan and Pelassy 1990). There are a number of objections levelled against single-country studies. Claims made on the basis of studying a single country are unlikely to be very robust. Single-country studies amass considerable detail, but interpretation of detail is likely to be deficient in the absence of either a comparative perspective or a sound theory, because there is no empirical or theoretical basis on which to draw conclusions. The ‘unique’ or special character of a particular country can be demonstrated only through comparing one country with others, so as to establish whether it is a deviant case. There is a danger of false universalism, of the drawing of universal generalisations from the single-country case-study. There are also hazards involved with treating countries themselves as coherent units of analysis. Reasoning in terms of overarching political cultures, policy styles or state traditions can overplay state-wide systemic effects and underplay within-country variations between the contrasting dynamics of specific policy sectors and arenas.

Of all the leading European nations, France is usually taken as the model of the unitary state. The movement of decentralisation in France has been gathering pace since the 1960s, however, with the landmark reforms of 1982–3 and 2003–4 representing staging posts in an ongoing process of incremental change. How best can we understand decentralisation in France? In this chapter, decentralisation in France is viewed through three alternative prisms – central steering, territorial capacity-building and identity construction. The first understanding of decentralisation in France is as part of a broader programme of state reform, part of a drive by central governors to divest themselves of unwanted or inflationary functions. It is an exercise in steering at a distance, a close approximation of our hypotheses 2 (regulatory mode of governance) and 7 (state capacity-building). The second understanding of decentralisation is in terms of new forms of local and regional governance practices, most closely matching our hypotheses 1 (participatory mode of governance), 3 (multi-actor coordination) and, to a lesser extent, 4 (multi-level dynamics). The third understanding of decentralisation in France refers to new forms of identity-based territorial mobilisation, in part captured by our first hypothesis (participatory mode of governance). Interlocutors repeatedly interpreted decentralisation in terms of one (or more) of these three main understandings, each of which is also embedded in different academic literatures.

Chapter 2 introduced the narrative of French history as that of a coherent central state defining the general will in an objective manner over and above specific professional, territorial or partisan interests. Mainstream French intellectual traditions have been hostile to the interplay of interests (Saurugger and Grossman 2006). In a classic orthodox account, Mény (1986) identified four features in the French policy style that favour the ‘general interest’ over more pluralist approaches: élus are representatives of the nation; deputies are not allowed to defend specific interests within the Assembly; access to the public sector is organised on the basis of merit, rather than quotas; and the Council of State is apt to use jurisprudence to label any decision of the state as being of ‘public utility’ or the ‘general interest’. In Mény's view, the state calls the shots in its relationship with professions and organised groups. The prevailing interpretation, articulated by Mény, is that the French state has historically been less tolerant towards autonomous groups than comparable countries. Organised group activity was forbidden during the French Revolution. Only in 1884, with the repeal of the Loi le Chapelier, were professional groups allowed to organise, but they remained weak (Guiliani 1991).

This narrative is historically inaccurate in important respects. The overarching référentiel has usually accommodated interests, whether framed in terms of maintaining social equilibrium (before 1939) or modernising society (after 1945). During the parliamentary-centred Third Republic, interests focused their attention on key parliamentary committees with power to distribute resources.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter gives an overview of the research design of the project, of the variables under investigation and of the data. Given the central research question underlying this project, convergence of national environmental policies is conceived as the dependent variable. Convergence is observed for twenty‐four countries over a period of thirty years. Policy convergence is measured as increasing policy similarity over time. Policy similarity is investigated with respect to three dimensions of policy: presence‐of‐policy, policy instruments and policy settings. In section 4.2, we specify the operationalisation of and data collection for the dependent variable.

As outlined in chapter 3, the explanatory focus of the project is on three factors as the main independent variables that are expected to account for differences in environmental policy convergence: (1) the degree of interlinkage of countries in international institutions with obligatory potential, (2) the degree of interlinkage of countries in international institutions with communicative potential, and (3) the degree of economic interlinkage, i.e., the extent to which a country is connected with other countries by its trade relations. Moreover, we include further explanatory variables (referred to as ‘other variables’ in chapter 3).

INTRODUCTION

This chapter deals with the following sub‐set of questions of the research project:

1. What is the direction of policy convergence; i.e., does convergence coincide with an upward (‘race‐to‐the‐top’) or downward trend (‘race‐to‐the‐bottom’)?

2. What institutional and economic factors (as well as other potentially relevant variables) can explain upward or downward patterns of environmental policy convergence?

3. To what extent do our empirical findings vary across different policy dimensions (presence‐of‐policies and policy settings) as well as across various policy types (trade‐related versus non‐trade‐related policies and obligatory versus non‐obligatory standards)?

Theoretically, this chapter builds upon delta‐convergence, dealing with convergence towards an exemplary model (Heichel, Pape and Sommerer 2005). Methodologically, this chapter builds on the so‐called gap approach, based on an assessment of the gaps between individual country policies on the one hand and a certain policy benchmark – for example the best practice available – on the other, over different points in time. An average policy gap change in the direction of the benchmark then points at delta‐convergence as well as at a ‘race‐to‐the‐top’, provided that the benchmark is the best practice.

This approach is complementary to the ‘classical’ ones as well as to the pair approach. On the basis of aggregate descriptive data and the concept of sigma‐convergence, the ‘classical’ approach (chapter 5) primarily dealt with the degree of convergence. By calculating changes in the regulatory mean, furthermore, an idea of the direction of convergence could be given.

This book is the result of a collaborative European research project. After first ideas to organise a joint project on the convergence of environmental policies had been put forward at a ‘tapas’ bar in Barcelona in autumn 2000, seven political scientists at five universities participated in the common endeavour: Christoph Knill (University of Jena, and later on, Konstanz, coordination), Katharina Holzinger (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Bonn, and later on, University of Konstanz), Martin Jänicke and Helge Jörgens (Free University Berlin), Bas Arts (University of Wageningen) and Duncan Liefferink (University of Nijmegen) and Andrea Lenschow (University of Salzburg and later on, Osnabrück). In a series of very inspiring, enjoyable and sometimes exciting meetings – one of them took place on 11 September 2001 – this group developed a joint research design and a proposal under the Fifth Framework Programme of the European Commission.

Under this programme, our research was supported by the RTD programme ‘Improving the human research potential and the socio‐economic knowledge base’, contract no. HPSE‐CT‐2002‐00103. Funds were provided from January 2003 to June 2006. This way the initial group could be complemented by a full dozen senior and junior researchers: Stephan Heichel, Jessica Pape, Maren Riepe, Jale Tosun and Natascha Warta in Konstanz, Thomas Sommerer and Tobias Meier in Hamburg, Per‐Olof Busch in Berlin, Johan Albrecht, Jelmer Kamstra, Jeroen Ooijevaar and Sietske Veenman in Nijmegen, and Dieter Pesendorfer in Salzburg.

INTRODUCTION

The central objective of this chapter is to assess the influence of three international mechanisms on the convergence of environmental policies in Europe, namely international harmonisation, transnational communication and regulatory competition. In so doing, we apply a novel concept – the pair approach – for measuring and explaining convergence.

In this chapter, three central research questions underlying this study are addressed. First, on the basis of the pair approach, we provide further insights into the extent of cross‐national policy convergence, which complement the aggregate analysis in chapter 5. Second, and this is the primary concern of this chapter, we investigate the specific impact of economic and institutional interlinkages between nation states on policy convergence. Third, and related to this point, we are interested in the explanatory relevance of possible alternative explanations (in particular domestic factors) that were introduced in the theoretical part of this book (chapter 3). In answering these questions, we merely concentrate on potential changes in the similarity of individual environmental policies and of policy repertoires of countries over time. The direction of convergence, i.e., movements to the top or to the bottom of regulation, is not the subject of the analysis in this chapter, but will be analysed in chapter 7.

Our analysis is based on the following steps. We first introduce the concept of the pair approach (section 6.2).

One of the key issues of globalisation research in the social sciences is the question of whether globalisation leads to the convergence of political institutions, policies, the legal order and societal structures (Guillén 2001: 235). Is the world becoming ever more similar as a result of globalisation and Europeanisation as the ‘world society approach’ (Meyer et al. 1997) implies? Does the strong growth of economic and institutional interlinkages between nation states lead to increasingly similar policy measures across countries? Or is the search for convergence emerging from the domestic impact of globalisation and European integration ‘an impossible quest’ (Dimitrova and Steunenberg 2000: 201), because domestic responses to global or European challenges are strongly influenced by existing domestic structures and institutions (see, for example, Cowles, Caporaso and Risse 2001; Héritier et al. 2001; Knill 2001)?

Although there has been an intensified and renewed debate on the convergence and divergence of national policies in recent years, we still have a limited understanding of the phenomenon of policy convergence.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter provides an overview of the empirically found patterns of cross‐national policy convergence. The central questions addressed are the following. First, are the environmental policies of the countries under study actually converging and, if so, to what extent? Second, what is the direction of policy convergence; i.e., does convergence coincide with an upward or downward shift of regulatory levels? Third, to what extent do our empirical findings vary across different policy dimensions (presence‐of‐policies, policy instruments and policy settings) and policy types (trade‐related versus non‐trade‐related policies, obligatory versus non‐obligatory policies)?

To answer these questions, we rely on aggregate data analysis to measure the degree and direction of convergence. This way, it is possible to highlight general convergence patterns for the countries and policies under study. In addition to the presentation of aggregate data, we illustrate different convergence patterns for individual policy items. The items reflect the different dimensions (policy presence, instruments and settings) and policy types under study.

For measuring the degree of convergence (i.e., the extent of changes in policy similarity over time), we use several concepts that are commonly applied in the literature (cf. Heichel, Pape and Sommerer 2005 and chapter 3 above). First, to analyse convergence with regard to the presence of policies and policy instruments, we rely on the concept of adoption rates. This approach, which is typically used in research on policy diffusion, gives us information on the spread of policies and instruments across countries.