Transposing EU-legislation on critical infrastructure protection legal implementation performance in the Baltic Sea region

Both, in the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine and in the proliferation of hybrid attacks on EU territory, critical energy infrastructure has become a primary target. One EU- response to the ensuing need for transnational action consists in the CER-Directive of 2022 on the resilience of critical entities. Its effectiveness now hinges on national implementation, currently pervaded by delay despite the undisputable urgency. To begin to shed some light, this study analyses legal implementation of the directive’s predecessor (ECI-Directive of 2008) to assess explanatory approaches from the discipline of implementation studies in the particular field of critical infrastructure protection. Focusing on the hotspot Baltic Sea Region, it shows how country-specific generalized expectations do not hold and how fundamental misfit between pre-existing national frameworks and a directive can instead help predict deviation. For the ECI-Directive, the study shows significant delays and deviation for individual countries, as well as only limited harmonization across the region.