The Ambient Air Quality Directive introduced subnational levels of governments as primary addressees of the air quality policy and changed the focus from emission-based to quality-based regulation. Scholars and practitioners alike have praised this novel policy design for the ability to address wicked problems due to “bottom-up”, context-sensitive and flexible decision-making. Despite these high hopes however, the success of the directive suffers from a large-scale EU non-compliance. This theoretical puzzle is also an empirical one. The Netherlands and Germany both adopted multi-level governance structures as the directive presupposes but arrived at contrasting policy outcomes, raising the question how the respective structures were used to achieve the desired outcomes.
This paper argues for a deeper understanding of workings within the coordination structures. To understand variable compliance levels within multi-level governance structures, we treat them as venues, which are populated by policy actors who carry different policy images. Arguably, the EU directive introduced new venues facilitating the entry of new policy actors and policy image pushing for new air quality solutions. Nevertheless, we demonstrate very different levels of success in the Netherlands and Germany although both countries adapted national legal and decision-making structures to the new multi-level governance organizational model. In Germany, the widened roster of participants remained in often conflictual and asymmetric power relation, and despite formal legal and organizational change, the old emission-based policy image persisted. In the Netherlands, we found a cohesive, cooperative multi-level governance structure that linked central to subnational governance levels. In contrast to Germany, these new structures allowed new images to enter, which ultimately lead to an overall different policy outcome. In short, linking an institutional perspective with more dynamic actor-centered and ideational lenses, we explain how the same structures could lead to different policy outcomes in the Netherlands and Germany.