Turning policy into real‑world action: exploring the implementation gap

What if the most challenging part of policymaking is not defining the right goals, but turning them into everyday reality?

Across policy areas, even well‑intentioned initiatives can struggle once implementation starts. Complex procedures, fragmented responsibilities, and competing priorities often make it difficult to deliver results as intended. Understanding how such challenges emerge and where fresh perspectives or simplification could make a difference is essential to closing the gap between policy design and real‑world outcomes.

At the EU Policy Lab, we explore this “implementation challenge” by bringing together behavioural insights, foresight and design. To do this, we took green policies as a case study to test how new ways of thinking about implementation can help translate Europe’s environmental ambitions into practice. 

Why is policy implementation key? 

When we talk about “policy,” we often picture laws, strategies, and targets. But implementation is everything that comes after adoption: translating EU rules into national law, organising responsibilities, funding actions, building capacity, monitoring progress, and enforcing compliance.

This is where great ambitions can falter. Implementation may stall for a variety of reasons:

• a directive is transposed late (or only partially),
• local authorities lack staff or budgets,
• procedures are complex or unclear,
• responsibilities are fragmented across levels of government,
• Member States interpret the rules differently,
• everyday decisions lead to delays, shortcuts, or workarounds. 

These various elements compound into lost opportunities. This matters because the success of the EU’s green transition depends not only on good legislation, but also on how it is delivered on the ground.

The policy context: strong ambitions, mixed progress 

A recent JRC assessment describes mixed progress so far, with acceleration needed in many areas to meet 2030 and 2050 objectives. This is why our project seeks to understand why implementation barriers happen for green policies, and which levers could realistically reduce them. 

 We examine two main dimensions:   

• legal implementation (e.g. national transposition, legal alignment, compliance), and
• administrative and practical implementation (how delivery happens within public administrations and affects citizens, businesses, and local bodies). 

We look at behavioural and structural drivers (from financial and technical factors to institutional habits and governance arrangements), recognising that these often interact in subtle ways. 

Our work unfolds in three main phases: 

1) Scoping phase: narrowing down the “too big” problem 

EU Green policy implementation spans many domains and 27 Member States, which is too broad to tackle at once.  To focus our efforts, we begin by: 

• Building evidence through a literature review of over 7,500 articles on implementation barriers, identifying recurring patterns using models that combine behavioural and structural perspectives. We are also running an observational study linking implementation outcomes (for example, timeliness or completeness) with Member State characteristics such as governance structures or parliamentary majorities. 

• Adapting methods to public policy realities and EU Policy Lab areas of expertise by tailoring the behavioural systems approach: a framework that combines systems thinking and behavioural science to map actors, decisions, and feedback loops, and to locate leverage points for intervention. 

The scoping phase helps us choose which policies and which contexts (Member States / levels of administration) are most relevant to focus on. 

2) Qualitative analysis: mapping the system 

Next, we will gather stakeholder input through interviews and workshops to build a behavioural systems map and identify potential barriers and leverage points (places where change could have significant impact). 

3) Quantitative analysis: testing what works 

The map and qualitative work aim to identify potential leverage points. We will then refine them through agent-based modelling to simulate interventions before testing them using behavioural experiments. Interventions may include behavioural (nudges, boosts) or more traditional ones (rules, enforcement approaches, financial incentives).  

Bringing behavioural insights, foresight, and design together 

The distinctiveness of this project lies in combining all three complementary lenses of the EU Policy Lab: 

• Behavioural insights (BI) help us understand how people make decisions (in ministries, agencies, municipalities, businesses, and communities) and how policies can be designed to work with human behaviour.
• Design for policy helps us turn complexity into something usable: mapping journeys, prototyping practical solutions, and ensuring insights translate into tools policymakers can actually apply.
• Foresight helps us think long-term: what futures are possible and preferred, what future scenarios could look like, how possible pathways may change, and how to make implementation more resilient under uncertainty.  

Behavioural systems as a shared “meeting point” 

The backbone of this project is behavioural systems analysis. A behavioural systems map looks a bit like other systems maps used in foresight and design, but with a key difference: behaviour is placed at the core (as a central “node” in the system). Connections between nodes are treated as testable behavioural hypotheses (for example: how a reporting burden might shape local choices, or how incentives in one part of the system affect coordination elsewhere). 

Source: sistemaFutura (Behavioural systems training) 

As the project evolves, we will experiment with combining these methods through several “integration loops.” Examples include:   

1. Foresight × BI: Stress‑testing behavioural interventions against future scenarios to ensure they remain effective as contexts change.
2. BI × Design: detecting “sludge” i.e.  unnecessary complexity in administrative processes and redesigning workflows, forms, or templates to make compliance smoother.
3. Foresight × Design × BI: Using foresight to imagine a desired future state, design methods to map the journey towards it, and behavioural testing to identify where execution tends to break down. 

What’s next? 

In the months ahead, we will: 

• Complete the literature review, 

• Carry out desk research on implementation practice (including “implementation dialogues” and related evidence) 

• Pilot the behavioural systems approach with EU Policy Lab and JRC colleagues working on the green transition,
• Apply it with policymakers (including the Secretariat General of the Commission and the Directorate-General for Environment) and public administrations at different governance levels in Member States. 

The goal is practical: to turn EU green ambition into real-world results by understanding how implementation systems shape behaviour, and how, in turn, behaviours shape those systems.