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This paper aims to provide an overview of environmental regulation and recent trends and developments in this area, rooted in the practical regulatory implementation activities of EPAs worldwide and drawing connection to sustainability, environmental risks, economics and environmental justice.

The design and methodology in developing “Better (Environmental) Regulation” is addressed drawn on experiences from different regulatory systems. It addresses the linkages between environment, economy, regulation and sustainability and adopts and develops Sparrow's approach to a focus on tackling harms.

A range of challenges in policy and practice terms – e.g. economic growth versus sustainability – is described. Arguments against the political economy convention of reducing burdens are made and a spectrum of compliance for regulators is offered, leading to a proposed agenda to help deliver better regulation generally.

A major challenge in arguing for an anti‐burden approach is the lack of a general ecosystem services approach and the dearth of valuation data to validate industry claims, demonstrate the costs of compliance and non‐environment and the value of protection.

The argument is presented that environmental regulation is of fundamental value not only to the environment per se but to tackling climate change and protecting society at large.

Hitherto there has been very little in the literature from a practitioner perspective, analysing and proposing improvements to environmental regulation in practice while preserving and securing environmental and sustainability policy objectives. This paper should support and encourage policy makers and implementers in improving practice.

Even though Greece is today one of the oldest EU members, it has often been criticized as a ‘laggard’ in the process of European Integration. This critic also applies on its Environmental Policy. While the negotiations for Greece's accession to the European Economic Community were fervent¹ and their results mostly welcomed by the Greek people, a ‘slow start’ was the reality. The then newly elected Socialist government had adopted a non-amicable stance against Euro-Atlantic institutions² (at least on a rhetoric level) which also had a significant effect on the country's Europeanization.

This article aims to take a critical look at the proposed Common European Sales Law (CESL) and its field of application.

The article provides a comparative analysis of the scope of application of CESL with that of the Convention on Contracts for the International Sales of Goods (CISG). The approach is critical in nature in that it questions the regulation of business‐to‐business (B2B) transactions under CESL. It also takes a critical look at the CESL and its coverage of three areas of contracting – sale of goods, supply of digital content, and supply of services.

The article exposes some of the shortcomings of the CESL in relation to its field of application.

The CESL as proposed offers an optional regulation that complicates the law of transborder sales within the European Union (EU) and between EU member states and non‐EU states. The article recommends that CESL not extend its coverage to B2B transactions and leave transborder commercial transactions to the CISG. The article also suggests other changes to improve the CESL.

Further analysis is needed and more defined rules should be considered before CESL is enacted into law.

This article questions the wide scope of application of CESL. It further questions the rationality and practicality of the CESL's coverage of B2B transactions.

The purpose of this paper is to compare the systems of fire and rescue services (FRS) in Estonia and Georgia with respect to recent centralization reforms, especially with performance measurement and management in mind, and analyse their prospects for successful implementations.

A desk study, covering all the main publicly available strategic plans of both countries relevant to FRS was conducted by the author. In addition, a meeting with the Georgian officials from the Emergency Management Agency was held in May 2016 and follow-up inquiries to specify certain aspects were made in the following two months.

This study demonstrates that Estonia is using performance indicators widely to set the target levels and manage the fire and rescue system, whereas Georgia is still under the process of introducing performance indicators. Therefore, since the systems of both countries are under centralized management in contrast to the typical European system, it would be suitable to learn from the reforms of each country to further understand the best practices.

Since Georgia was in the process of reform in 2016, it does not have many performance indicators or impact evaluations of the reform readily available, which makes the possibilities of comparison limited.

The last reform of the FRS in Estonia and Georgia was similar: the centralization of services to increase the potential of cooperation and standardize the level of service provision. Estonia’s FRS system is eager to implement the reforms based on a data-driven analysis, whereas Georgia, still in the process of reform, does not have many performance indicators. As a result, Georgia and other countries aiming to centralize their FRS system in the near future would have the perfect opportunity to learn from Estonia’s reforms as well as predict and adapt to the possible bottlenecks of the reforms. For a wider audience, an analysis of the possible challenges of centralizing public agencies in transitional countries are of interest.

The public service provision is not widely analysed in the context of transition countries. As the reforms are to some extent the result of the accession process of joining the EU, it is crucial to understand whether the reforms have the planned impact on public services. The current paper analysed the reforms and implementations of public management techniques in the FRS, based on two transitional countries: Estonia and Georgia. FRS has seen relatively few studies analysing and comparing the reforms of different countries.

The 17 December 2004 was a turning point in both Turkish and European history: The European Council followed the European Commission's recommendation and approved the opening of accession negotiations with Turkey, which commenced on 3 October 2005. The goal of accession to the European Union (EU) has become one of the main driving forces for broadly defined legal, political, economic, and financial reforms in Turkey.²

This introduction from Andrea Óhidy and Katalin R. Forray provides a brief overview of the social and educational situation of Roma in the Western Balkan region and the structure of this book. Like in the books Lifelong Learning and the Roma Minority in Central and Eastern Europe (2019) and Lifelong Learning and the Roma Minority in Western and Southern Europe (2020), Roma are here described as a ‘hidden minority’ (Cavioni, 2020, p. 68), because despite the great number and the century-long history of Roma people on the European continent, there is still only limited information and knowledge about them, both in public awareness and scientific research. Although most members of the Roma minority have been living for centuries in their European home countries, their situation is still different from the non-Roma populations: They often suffer from socio-economic disadvantages and hate-motivated harassment and discrimination (EU-FRA, 2020a). This is not only the case in the member-states of the European Union but also in the Western Balkan region. All across Europe, there are Roma groups, which are considered to be the most disadvantaged minority, regarding their health, employment and housing and also in education. To increase their situation, European Union member states have developed common strategies, which play a part in negotiations for an EU-membership status. The so-called Western Balkan states – Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia – might join the European Union in the coming years. The social inclusion of the Roma minority and the protection of their minority rights in these countries were formulated as a precondition for their application for EU membership. Therefore, several goals, policies and measures were implemented there to break the ‘vicious circle of poverty and discrimination’ (EU-FRA, 2020b). Participation in education and lifelong learning have become central elements of these political measures for Roma Inclusion. This book examines the education situation of Roma across the so-called Western Balkan region.

This chapter seeks to examine the legal development of Public–Private Partnerships (PPPs) in Kosovo and to assess their role in economic development in Kosovo, as well as PPPs’ function to Kosovo in achieve the Copenhagen criteria to access the European Union (EU). This chapter analyses the theoretical arguments behind PPPs as a mean of narrowing the infrastructure-financing gap and assess the evolution of PPPs’ jurisdiction on Kosovo and EU’s position on PPPs. This chapter includes a detailed critical analysis of the present legal framework on PPPs in Kosovo and a case study of Pristina International Airport. This chapter concludes that PPPs could be the only alternative that Kosovo has, till date, to achieve economic growth. Indeed, it can help the country to be closer to European standards, when it cuts out corruption from these partnerships. This chapter contributes to the debate on the use of PPPs in Kosovo for the construction of major infrastructures, although they are still in a very embryonic process. This chapter presents a comprehensive analysis of the benefits and risks that PPPs could offer to Kosovo as a newly formed state, contributing to the academic debate on PPPs in Balkan countries and providing useful tools for policy-makers in the decision-making process, providing a clear description of new PPPs legislation in Kosovo.

The unequal distribution of economic activities, transposed in economic, social and territorial disparities is the general characteristic of the European economy. Gaps increased in the context of European Union (EU) enlargement towards Eastern and Central Europe and of the economic crisis, thus bringing new differentiations among member states’ economies. The main aim of the chapter is to emphasise the centre-periphery differentiations in the European economy, by using a composite index of peripherality, in order to better understand the determinants of growth and convergence in Central and Eastern European countries and to reach normative conclusions for increasing Cohesion Policy (CP) effectiveness. The first part of the chapter provides a short overview of the main theories and models of the peripherality analysis and the relationships between the centre and the periphery, in order to find out how this analysis relates to the research in the field. The second part provides a comparative analysis of the evolution of European economies during 2003–2014, in order to find out whether the EU enlargement process stabilised the EU core-periphery pattern or, on the contrary, the process of core-periphery structural convergence occurred. The third part includes the suggested model of analysis (methodology, data, and main results) from a multidisciplinary perspective, underlining the centre-periphery differentiations on the two axes, North–South and West–East. The results have been interpreted in conclusions, with a focus on their relevance for the European CP challenges.

The purpose of this paper is to explain why, in spite having a relatively powerful labour movement at the start of the economic transformation, Romania ended up with a highly deregulated system of industrial relations in the aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2009 and with trade unions which seem incapable to defend their interests.

The authors trace the changing role that Romanian trade unions had in national policy making and show that the beginning of 2000s represents a critical point for the power loss sustained by organised labour.

The authors argue that a key element for explaining labour’s decline is the growing pressure exercised by various international organisations for the adoption of deregulatory labour market reforms. While during the 1990s this pressure was circumvented by successive governments which peddled back and forth between union wage pressure and fiscal austerity measures, beginning with 2000s, EU accession conditionalities coupled with IMF and World Bank policy recommendations enabled the international deregulation agenda to be implemented without much opposition.

The paper brings new evidence on the impact of international actors on the Romanian collective bargaining and labour market institutions.