Addressing a creeping crisis like climate change requires nothing less than a system transition. A system transition is very complex and hence its success depends to a large extent on feedback effects: mechanisms where an initial change reinforces itself or balances itself out. Urgent crises are more salient than creeping crises. However, it is possible to combine policies for both urgent and creeping crises, as can be seen in policies that aim for a green recovery. In this article, we conclude that up till now such policies have overlooked the relevance of feedback effects. We provide examples of corona recovery measures that simultaneously help to establish a system transition through feedback effects.

The European Commission publishes bi-annual internal market scoreboards which show the member states’ performance in realizing internal market rules. Timely and correct transposition of internal market directives is a crucial part hereof. Member states are regarded as unitary actors. Consequently the Commission does not differentiate the performances of their constituent sub-national entities. This article constructs the internal market scoreboards for Flanders (2009-2013) and holds these against the Belgian performance. In order to frame the fluctuations in the Flemish performance per scoreboard, external and internal factors that help explain maltransposition are pretested in the Flemish case. Flanders struggles with transposition, transposing barely a fourth of the directives under its competence timely and correctly, with timeliness being most problematic. The factors that seem to be connected to this performance, however, are structural and cannot easily be influenced. Further research is needed to go from this exploration toward explaining maltransposition in Flanders.