The Coordination of the European Union Exploring the Capacities of Networked Governance

by Jordan, Andrew; Schout, Adriaan

• ISBN13: 9780199286959
• ISBN10: 0199286957
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-01-18
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

All policy systems are struggling to respond to wicked policy problems like international terrorism, drug crime and unsustainable development, none more so than the European Union (EU) which is renowned for its fluidity, deeply sectorized structures and weak political leadership. As the traditional mode of coordinating - essentially issuing regulation - no longer commands sufficient political support, the EU has turned to what are increasingly termed soft or 'new' modes of governance, which rely upon different actors working together in relatively non-hierarchical networks. New modes of governance are in vogue because they appear to provide the EU with a new way to add value to national level activities without the slow and process of agreeing new legislation or the cost associated with building new administrative capacities in Brussels. This analysis provides the first book-length account of how effective network-based modes are at addressing problems that simultaneously demand greater levels of horizontal and vertical coordination. Taking, as an example, the thirty year struggle to build environmental thinking into all areas and levels of EU policy making, it systematically explores the steps that two major EU institutions (the European Commission and the European Parliament), and three member states (Germany, the Netherlands and the UK) have (not) taken to build effective networked governance. By blending state of the art theories with new empirical findings, it offers a stark reminder that networked governance is not and has never been a panacea. Coordinating networks do not spontaneously 'self organise' in the EU; they have to be carefully designed as part of a repertoire of different coordinating instruments. The book concludes that the EU urgently needs to devote more of its time to the more mundane but important task of auditing and managing network, which, paradoxically, is an exercise in hierarchy. In so doing, this book helps to strip awaysome of the rhetorical claims made about the novelty and appeal of new modes, to reveal a much more sober and realistic appraisal of their coordinating potential.

Author Biography

Dr. Andrew Jordan is Reader in Environmental Politics and Philip Leverhulme Prize Fellow in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. He is a Manager of the ESRC Programme on Environmental Decision-making (PEDM) in the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment's (CSERGE). He has edited the international journal Environment and Planning C (Government and Policy) since 1998, and published over a hundred peer reviewed papers and chapters, as well as eight books on different aspects of contemporary environmental policy and politics.
Dr Adriaan Schout works as Senior Researcher for the Clingendael European Studies Programme in the Hague (Netherlands) and as Associate Professor at the European Institute of Public Administration in Maastricht (Netherlands). He has extensively studied the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, European agencies, EU governance and the multilevel coordination of EU policies. His research has involved organizational analyses of national ministries, the Commission and the European Parliament as well as several European Agencies. He has worked for a number of different clients, including national and EU institutions.

Table of Contents

Political Ambitions and Coordination Capacities: The management of horizontal and vertical interdependence

Multilevel Coordination Capacities

Environmental Policy Integration at EU Level: A catalogue of coordinating capacities

The Coordination of European Union Policy: Actor perspectives

Environmental Policy Integration: Actor perspectives

Germany: A reactive and passive coordinator?

The Netherlands: From event to issue coordination?

The United Kingdom: Strong administration but weak political ambitions?

The European Commission: An organization in transition?

The European Parliament: A partially disengaged partner?

The Coordination of the European Union: Understanding the capacities of networked governance

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.