Explaining Differences in the Performance of Clean Air Policies: an international and interregional comparative study

Abstract

On the basis of a large international comparative study of implementation policies from 14 different regional implementation systems (RIS) from the Federal Republic of Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy and the Netherlands, we first tried to identify the impact of regional policies in terms of their capacity to influence the behaviour of individual emitters within selected local implementation areas (LIA). For each of the 14 regions we selected two to three LIAs with different structures of industrial and domestic SO2 emitters. We aimed at having one ofthe three LIAs as a metropolitan area, the second one as a heavily industrialised area and the third one with a somehow mixed emitters structure. Within each of these local areas we tried to compare changes over time in the local ambient air quality (‘immission’ data in the field of sulphur dioxide — SO2), relating these to the total amount of emission produced by local emitters. In a second step we tried to find out, by means of interviews conducted with the main emitters, the different motives behind observed changes in their behaviour.