Oslo 8-9 October 2018

On 8 and 9 October 2018, WP6-participants met in Oslo for a work package meeting. Two Danish participants were present through Skype. A total of 15 participants presented progress in each task and discussed the way forward in terms of activities, participating partners and a time line for the coming months. We kindly acknowledge the hospitality of our Norwegian partner NIVA who organized this meeting very well.

We discussed the preparation of phase 2 of the questionnaire of task 6.2 in more detail. This phase 2 will consist of a survey that will deliver the additional data to be used in most of the other tasks.

As key messages so far, we have identified the following:

• Regulatory structures at EU, National and Regional levels are very comprehensive and fragmented
• High degree of divergence in how Directives are transposed into national law
• Shades of former pre-EU legislative structures still exist (old issues continue)
• Diversity is not good or bad (both legislation and case studies), it is a reality we have to deal with
• Because of this complexity and diversity, it will be our challenge for the coming years to translate good examples of local government arrangements to other areas, and to advice the EC on further improvements of the regulatory structure at EU level to enable this
• Our data on governance originate from the case studies, this limits the scope of our conclusions (disclaimer).

Sandra Boekhold