The study of European environmental policy continues to be a growth area. Conceptually and empirically, the analysis of environmental policy in a European context poses tough challenges. Apart from the highly technical nature of many of the issues, the increasing importance of policy processes involving European Union institutions and other European policy actors has created a highly complex policy context. Analysts of public policy who traditionally focus mainly on national and subnational policy processes had to expand their horizon to take account of the European dimension. Calls to combine both comparative public policy and international relations approaches in the analysis of “multilevel” European policy-making have been made for many years, and empirical studies attempting to meet this challenge are now increasingly coming forward.

Rüdiger Wurzel seeks to contribute to the literature on European multilevel policy analysis with comparative case studies of two environmental issues, car emission and bathing water quality, with particular regard to two countries, Britain and Germany. Wurzel's book constitutes an empirically ambitious attempt to describe and analyze the career of both policies over the entire policy cycle, stretching over several decades. On the basis of more than 100 interviews conducted over a 10-year period starting in the early 1990s and extensive archive work, the author is able to paint a picture rich in detail. Good use is made of the often incisive comments of policy insiders that cut through the official version of governmental policy presentations, revealing the real motivations and calculations of key policy actors.

The presentation of the two case studies is preceded by three chapters that attempt to place the material within a broader context. The first introductory chapter presents a rundown of a range of factors that could explain the adoption of different policy approaches by Britain, Germany, and the European Union (EU). The third introductory chapter outlines the key environmental policy actors at the EU level, and it also includes brief but useful summaries of key changes over time. Somewhat awkwardly squeezed in between these two chapters is a theoretical chapter that defines the conceptual rationale for the whole book. Here, a range of approaches for understanding environmental policymaking in a European context is presented and discussed, drawn from both the comparative politics and international relations literature. While the need to overcome traditional disciplinary boundaries within political science is acknowledged, Wurzel seeks out the “policy network” approach as his starting point in order to delineate policy processes at different levels. The other key term is that of the “regulatory style,” a notion essentially derived from the policy style literature (Jeremy Richardson, ed., Policy Styles in Western Europe, 1982). By comparison, approaches from the European integration/international relations tradition appear to play a more marginal role. Given that the subtitle of the book includes the term “Europeanisation,” it is surprising that the increasingly prominent literature on Europeanization is not discussed more systematically.

The main research questions of the book essentially focus on the interaction between EU and national policy processes and address the determinants of EU environmental policy measures, the importance of differences in national environmental regulatory styles for EU decision making, and the way conflicts over EU environmental policy are conducted and settled. After the presentation of the case study material, which takes up about 60% of the text, the author returns in a rather brief concluding chapter to the theoretical questions and sets out what he regards as the chief results of his analysis.

Wurzel argues that both case studies provide strong evidence that different national regulatory styles matter in terms of the way different national governments approach the EU policy process and, as such, have to be accommodated in the decision-making process. However, national governments generally do not succeed in simply exporting national policies to the European level. The need to take account of national styles is just one of several aspects explaining the outcome of EU policymaking; others include the role of what Wurzel calls “policy spoilers and veto actors,” such as vested interests of a sectoral or national character. However, policy conflicts, he argues, are not necessarily organized according to strictly defined and stable conflict lines but often cut across national and sectoral boundaries.

One of the chief limitations of the book is the relative narrowness of its focus, being restricted to the analysis of just two policy issues and their career within two countries. Wurzel acknowledges this potential limitation but claims that in the light of other published case studies, “the findings do seem to be representative” (p. 273). A more systematic analysis of this claim would, however, have been desirable. Can we really be sure that the general conclusions summarized here apply to all types of environmental policy issues and to all countries to an equal degree? What we would need in order to test propositions about, say, the importance of national regulatory styles for EU policymaking is a far more broadly based research design covering a greater number of policy issues as well as countries, selected according to a well-defined comparative logic.

Case studies of the type presented by Wurzel are extremely important in formulating hypotheses that can then be tested more rigorously. Here, perhaps, lies the chief limitation of Environmental Policy-Making in Britain, Germany and the European Union. It is essentially a descriptive book that tells an interesting story; it is not a study guided by an explicit logic of the formulation of hypotheses derived from theory and their rigorous testing. Theoretical concepts are used in a more limited, heuristical way to shed further light on the story told. At the end, the implications of the findings for various theories are briefly discussed, but, again, this is done in an essentially ex post fashion.

In conclusion, this book presents two well-researched case studies with many new findings that will be of great interest to students of EU, German, and British environmental policy-making. It also raises many broader questions about the determinants of environmental policy within a multilevel European policy environment that will inform further empirical research in this exciting area.