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The journal West European Politics just published Eva Thomann and Viktoria Brendler’s new research on the customisation of the European Union’s (EU) renewable energy (RE) policy by member states. They examined how institutional misfit theory explains member states’ customisation of the EU’s RE policy as it was implemented domestically. Institutional misfit theory examines how well a new EU policy fits existing domestic institutions and policies in a member state. Traditionally, the expectation would be that a low institutional fit triggers non-compliance with EU law by member states. However, this article focuses not on compliance but on customisation, that is, how member states change the content of EU policies to adapt to specific national circumstances. Could misfit trigger customisation instead of non-compliance, in a policy area that is of such high strategic importance that non-compliance is not really an option?

Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis, the authors compared the customisation of a 2009 EU Directive on Renewable Energy in six countries – Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. Surprisingly, they found that institutional misfit hardly plays a role when member states customise the Directive. Instead, they found that the interaction between a good institutional fit and the issue’s perceived importance and salience dictated how states customised the policy.  Countries whose existing policies were already aligned with the EU policy were unlikely to implement any customisation if the issue did not affect an important economic activity or the interests of influential policy actors. Conversely, countries whose policies were already aligned but found the issue important were more likely to implement more ambitious rules than the EU required. The authors conclude that patterns of compliant, but differentiated policy implementation in the EU, such as customisation, are a distinct phenomenon that requires fresh theorizing from EU scholars.

Link to publication - https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2023.2166734

Source of the graph: Brendler & Thomann (2023:14)