Bachelor Student Prize Winner

Eighteen students completed their bachelor's degree in 2021 with a thesis that was labelled ‘excellent’ by their faculty. Here you will find a short introduction to these excellent theses in the form of an "elevator pitch" from each student, plus a video in which the supervisor briefly addresses the lucky winner.

Konstantin Reiners

  Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences | Bachelor European Studies

"Good Cop or Bad Cop? How the NGO Deutsche Umwelthilfe Expedites the Practical Implementation of the Ambient Air Quality Directive in Germany"

Konstantin's elevator pitch
Too often, European Union legislation remains ineffective because member states do not comply with its provisions. The goal of this thesis was to explore the potential of NGOs to address this problem by acting as decentralised enforcers of EU law. Which NGO strategy is effective in stimulating domestic compliance: a good cop strategy of cooperation with the non-compliant state or a bad cop strategy of (legal) confrontation? The analysis of the case of the German NGO Deutsche Umwelthilfe, which seeks to enforce the Air Quality Directive, reveals a high potential for the role that NGOs can play. In particular, the bad cop strategy of flooding the country with a wave of legal proceedings helped to increase the salience of the issue, indirectly releasing those capacities that the authorities had still lacked to comply with the directive.