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A 'burden reducing' agenda has spurred an increased interest in how EU environmental legislation is transposed into national legislation--most prominently reflected in the principle of 'no gold-plating'. Yet, an important question is to what extent transposition principles and practices may ensure a coherent and accessible body of environmental legislation, while at the same time ensuring adequate transposition of EU environmental legislation. This article analyses the existence, or emergence, of transposition principles and practices in three Member States--the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Denmark. It also examines how EU initiatives may influence these principles and practices. The article concludes that the steering of transposition processes by general transposition principles and objectives alone, and in particular those dominated by a 'burden reducing' agenda, has a limited focus on coherence and accessibility with respect to environmental legislation and that such issues deserve more attention in the transposition process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the scope of criminal and administrative law enforcement of environmental violations in four Western European jurisdictions. The Flemish Region and the United Kingdom have, until mid-2009, largely relied only on criminal sanctioning while administrative sanctions, which have also been in use since mid-2009, have already been widely used in the Netherlands and Germany. This article considers whether, given a fixed budget for the relevant national environment agency, single (criminal) or multiple (criminal and administrative) enforcement instruments are adequate to induce compliance. The fact that administrative proceedings are less strict and more informal than criminal proceedings suggests that the imposition of administrative sanctions is a relatively cheaper alternative. Therefore, in case of environmental violations, it is cost-effective to complement criminal law enforcement by administrative law rather than to allow for a single (criminal) sanctioning instrument. Complementary use of these two instruments might lead to additional deterrence. Data is presented to illustrate this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]