Maritime spatial planning and regional EU lobbying

Abstract

Regions in the EU are becoming increasingly responsible for implementing EU legislation. This has incentivised regions to increase their efforts of influencing EU legislation. It is currently poorly understood why regions are sometimes successful in influencing policy change in the EU. In this thesis, I analyse three factors that could influence regional lobbying success. I do this by looking at the lobbying coalitions made during the maritime spatial planning (MSP) directive policy process. This thesis shows that the timing of lobbying, the internal cohesion of a coalition and the amount of members in a coalition all affect lobbying success of coalitions with regions in them. The most important finding however, is that regions do not seem to have direct influence in shaping EU policy. In EU policy creation processes, the Council, the Commission and the European Parliament are the three responsible bodies. Regional lobbying during the MSP policy creation process seems to have partially shaped the opinions in the Council but not the opinions of the Commission and European Parliament. The Dutch and German regions managed to partially shape the opinion of their national government. These national governments then in turn shaped the opinions in the Council. Thus, showing that regions had indirect influence but not direct influence in shaping the MSP directive.