Do the characteristics of the European executive order engender administrative behaviour by national agency officials that differ from those engendered by the traditional intergovernmental order, and if so, how?
That is the question Gulbrandsen asked in this doctoral dissertation, which is made up of three articles concerned with individual aspects of this problem within the maritime safety sector: The impact on practical implementation by ‘street-level bureaucrats’, the impact on administrative behaviour within a national agency and the impact on intra-EU coordination at negotiations in a global international organization, the International Maritime Organization.
The dissertation finds three mechanisms whereby the EU changes administrative behaviour: Firstly, compliance with EU rules become more important than compliance with IMO rules. Secondly, the EU directly transforms the practical implementation of both EU and IMO rules. Thirdly, the EU imposes a coordination regime that fundamentally alters the relationship of EU states with the IMO.
However, the dissertation also finds three limitations to this transformation: Firstly, the IMO is a more comprehensive regulator within the sector. Secondly, the formal aspects of relations between nation-states and IMO have not changed. Thirdly, the EU is emphatically not granted any special status in the IMO, demonstrating that it faces challenges in being recognized abroad as the kind of entity it is recognized as internally.
In his trial lecture Gulbrandsen discussed the topic: How does the Europeanization of the Norwegian Maritime Directorate compare to the theoretical mechanisms identified by the literature on the Europeanization of national political parties?