Local governments’ tools as enforcement actors of EU law: stored in a black box

Abstract

As a result of the expansion of EU law, today’s local governments are strongly Europeanised. Therefore, over the past decennia, they became increasingly important enforcement actors within the European Union. Even more, a positive execution obligation on the part of local governments can be inferred from EU legal principles such as the primacy principle and the principle of sincere cooperation. In short, this means that local governments are expected to actively apply EU law, even when they are confronted with a contradiction between European law on the one hand and national law on the other. However, political science research illustrates that local governments are not fully aware of their execution obligation to enforce EU law, nor of the scope of it. In other words, local governments are not fully aware of their enforcement responsibilities within the EU legal order. This paper explains that the ambiguity at the local level derives from the diffuse legal framing of the local execution obligation and seeks for the possibility of a more unequivocal approach of local governments as enforcement actors.