Bureaucratic politics in customized implementation of the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive in France and Germany

When implementing EU policies, national policy bureaucracies often face a goal conflict when national policy preferences are not aligned with the EU policy and they are granted little discretion in implementation: While customized implementation allows them to adjust EU policies to the national context, it also risks noncompliance with EU law and blame for unpopular EU policies. This bureaucratic politics perspective has received little attention in institutionalist and interest-based explanations of customized implementation. With a bureaucratic politics approach, this article argues that national governments pursue strategies of blame avoidance and reputation seeking when confronted with high goal conflict between timely and correct implementation and substantive (national) policy goals. This argument is illustrated in a comparative case study on the implementation of the EU Single-Use Plastics Directive in France and Germany. This article identifies bureaucratic strategies of blame avoidance and reputation seeking as an underlying mechanism of customized implementation.