Use of Expertise within the European Commission: Instrumental or Tactical? Analysis of the use of expertise by the European Commission in the diesel-car emission regulation case Author: Camilla Villano (S1945556) Supervisor: Johan Christensen Second Reader: Anchrit Wille Public Administration: International & European Governance Faculty of Governance & Global Affairs Leiden University Words: 18000 1 INDEX Chapter 1: Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 3 1.1 Diesel-car emission regulation case overview .............................................................................. 3 1.2 Research Question ......................................................................................................................... 5 1.3 Expectations .................................................................................................................................. 5 1.4 Research Design and Methodology ............................................................................................... 7 Chapter 2: Theory ................................................................................................................................. 8 2.1 Role And Use Of Expertise Within The European Commission ................................................ 8 2.2 Expectations ................................................................................................................................ 12 2.2.1 Expert Knowledge biased due to high influence from interest groups ................................. 12 2.2.3 Expertise is biased due to high influence from Member States............................................ 17 2.3 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 19 Chapter 3: Methodology ..................................................................................................................... 20 3.1 Research Design: Single Case Study ........................................................................................... 20 3.2 Why the diesel-car emission regulation case ............................................................................... 21 3.3 Methodology: Process-Tracing ................................................................................................... 21 3.4 Data Collection ............................................................................................................................ 22 2.5 Operationalization ....................................................................................................................... 23 3.6 Common Threats to Inference ..................................................................................................... 24 3.7 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 25 Chapter 4: Analysis ............................................................................................................................. 26 4.1 Diesel Car Emission Regulation Case Description: .................................................................... 26 4.2 The use of expertise by the European Commission in the diesel-car emission regulation case .. 29 4.2.1 The JRC role in the Diesel Car Emission Regulation Case .................................................. 30 4.2.2 The main pitfalls of the European Commission in the Volkswagen Scandal ....................... 33 4.3 Expert Knowledge is biased due to high influence from interest groups .................................... 37 4.4 Bureaucratic Politics explains the use of expertise within the EU. ............................................. 40 4.5 Knowledge is biased by high influence from Member States in expert working groups ............ 42 4.6 Results ......................................................................................................................................... 44 4.6 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 45 Chapter 5: Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 46 5.1 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 46 5.2 Academic implications ................................................................................................................ 47 5.3 Study limitations ......................................................................................................................... 48 5.4 Discussion ................................................................................................................................... 49 ANNEX: Documents used................................................................................................................... 50 REFERENCES .................................................................................................................................... 51 2 Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Diesel-car emission regulation case overview In 2015 the 4 Billion German company, Volkswagen (VW) has been caught cheating on his diesel car emission performance modifying its cars and presenting them much less polluting than they actually were (The Guardian, 2015). The mischief was ultimately confirmed by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) which declared that almost 500,000 VW diesel cars present in America were emitting more than double nitrogen oxides (NOx) respect to the standard accepted by the law (The Guardian, 2015). Since then, VW confessed that the event is not limited to the cars sold in the United States (US) but it affects almost eleven million cars in the world (The Guardian, 2015). This event led to much more dangerous NOx emission present into the air respect to the legal standards (The Guardian, 2015). The EPA was supported by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a non- governmental organization (NGO), that had a key role in discovering the emission discrepancies, by performing independent on-road emissions tests on VW’s diesel cars (The Guardian, 2015). The emissions performance of Volkswagen cars was so bad with respect to the legal standards that the ICCT performed other tests on a dynamometer to be 100 per cent sure (The Guardian, 2015). It was the ICCT that got in touch with the EPA and warned them that further investigation would have been needed (The Guardian, 2015). This scandal means enormous consequences for the environment and human health (The Guardian, 2015). The higher emissions can lead to strong inflammation of the airways and strongly worsen the breathing for any person (The Guardian, 2015). Moreover, the NOx emissions can easily react with other compounds present in the air leading to bad respiratory conditions and increasing the risk for heart diseases (The Guardian, 2015). While those events were taking place in America, in Europe the European Commission (EC) and the European Parliament (EP) were aware of the enormous differences between the NOx emissions of diesel cars measured through the laboratory tests – all meeting the legal limit – and their actual emissions in real driving conditions, highly exceeding the legal limit (European Parliament, 2017). The existence of those differences, and their significant impact on meeting the air quality objectives set up with the European air quality standards, have been known to the Commission, Member States representative and to many other stakeholders since 2010/ 3 2011 (European Parliament, 2017). This was possible thanks to specific researches done by the in-house expertise body of the European Commission, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) that confirmed that the discrepancies in the emissions by many car manufacturers were happening since 2010-2011 (JRC, 2011). Some key actors, such as the commissioner Janez Potocnik’s (DG Environment) campaigned to start taking action about it in the same year (European Parliament, 2017). One year later a special "real driving emissions (RDE)" working group with stakeholder Member States and industry is established by the Directorate General for internal market, industries and SMEs (DG Grow), with main objective the development of a new and more robust Real Driving Emission (RDE) test for diesel cars (European Praliament, 2017). In November 2012, the Commission publishes its plan to deal with the issue as part of a broader policy paper on the car industry called CARS2020. The key point is that the Commission says it will introduce more robust, on-road testing of cars from 2017 (European Commission, 2012). It’s noticeable that the commission needed a very long time to introduce new real driving emissions tests. This long process can only be partly explained by the complex procedure that the development of a new test procedure usually takes (European Parliament, 2017). Even if the length of the decision-making and administrative processes at the EU level is taken into account, it is not enough to explain why the Commission took such a long time to introduce new test procedure, which if implemented earlier, could have also discovered cheating car manufacturers (European Parliament, 2017). The official reason behind the excessive length of Commissions of the implementation