Updated: July 2023

When the EU adopts new rules, it does so either in the form of regulations or in the form of directives.
The primary difference between these two types of legal act is that once adopted, the regulation enters into force immediately and in the same way for all EU member states. Thus, the EU determines how the national authorities and courts must put the law into practice.

The directive, on the other hand, establishes a norm or goal which all of the member states must achieve, but it does not dictate how the member states are to achieve them - following the adoption of the directive, the member states have to do what is called a transposition of the directive, which is the process of incorporating EU directives into the national laws.
The member states are therefore free to adapt their laws in whichever way they find necessary and sufficient, as long as the national law is formulated in a way which does not differ too much from the formulation of the directive, and the member states usually have 2-3 years from the date the directive is adopted to transpose the directive into national law.

For each directive, some countries use the transposition to initiate or improve progressive policies, e.g. for sustainable energy, while others are doing the transposition with minimal changes of national legislation to conform with the requirements of the directive, but without much impact. This often results in a significant discrepancy in the effectiveness of EU directives in one country compared to another, and can make it difficult to reach the EU's overall targets, for instance for the green transition.

For directives for renewable energy and energy efficiency, the national legislation is key to achieving the EU and national goals of sustainable energy and climate policies. Additionally, transposition can include or exclude other sustainability issues. An example of this is the way in which the biofuels directive has been transposed, where environmental criteria for agriculture in the production of biofuels can be included or excluded in the national legislation.

Knowledge about how EU directives are transposed in other countries is important as inspiration for the transposition in one's own country, and can serve to set a best practice for the transposition, and may even contribute to ensuring the quality of future legislation. The transposition must be efficient (lead to the expected improvements) and sustainable (not lead to other environmental problems).


On the pages below, we have included an overview of the transposition of a number of EU directives:

• Biofuels
• Renewable Energy in Electricity
• Energy efficiency in Housing

If you have good or bad examples of transposition, please let us know. Send an email to ove@inforse.org. We will gradually expand the overview of implementation.

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