As new policy initiatives shuttle through the EU’s institutions, we expect policy-makers to chisel away at the language contained in these proposals to make sure that policies’ anticipated effects match policy-makers’ preferences before they are formally adopted. Yet, even once a policy successfully exits the legislative arena, its actual impact may be subject to change. In their article “Many faces of dismantling: hiding policy change in non-legislative acts in EU environmental policy” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Jan Pollex and Andrea Lenschow argue that the EU’s regulatory legislation typically provides the European Commission with opportunities to shape the actual effects of policies after their adoption by designing specific implementation measures. In light of the Commission’s prioritisation of fostering economic growth in response to the economic crisis, Jan and Andrea provide case studies of the EU’s ecolabel and ecodesign policies and show that the Commission had used its powers of specifying implementing measures to ease the regulatory pressure in the EU’s environmental policy. Jan and Andrea’s analysis highlights that in order to evaluate the EU’s environmental policy it is necessary to pay close attention to the actual implementation of policy, as “we might see policy dismantling in disguise, effectively softening environmental regulatory pressure on producers within rather stable regulatory structures.”