The EU and ‘governance’

The European Union’s policy instrument of choice has been - and very largely remains - legislation. But under the heading of ‘governance’ the EU has started to search for new ways to ensure the quality and legitimacy of its policy outputs.

A broad and ambitious set of measures have been agreed by the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament, including the target to reduce the burden of EU legislation by 25% by 2012, more and better consultations, better planning and priority setting, and the adoption of alternative instruments. In addition, EU policymakers have pledged to tackle a whole raft of horizontal objectives - ie, those that cut across several policy fields and/or address the process through which policies are put together. These include ‘integration’ objectives such as environmental integration and gender mainstreaming, ‘better regulation’, subsidiarity, proportionality and enhancing the evidence base of policies through the production of impact assessments.

These ambitions to act in a more ‘joined-up’ manner are widely supported. From the European Council and the sectoral formations of the Council of Ministers, through to the Commission and the Parliament, all have sought to emphasise the political importance of ensuring that the EU’s governance matches its political objectives. In this way each and every policy sector is now expected to consider what impact its preferred policies might have on a much broader set of quality and consistency considerations. If they do, it should help the EU to live up to the Lisbon Agenda objective of making the EU a competitive global player while adhering to its environmental and social objectives.

But how well is the EU delivering on these promises? Evaluations of impact assessments, new instruments, horizontal policy objectives (such as the integration of the environment) or the Lisbon Agenda vary from being mildly to wholly critical. There are several reasons to explain the gap between the political expectations that have been created and the results. One of them is the lack of concern for the administrative capacities that are needed at national and EU level to make ‘governance’ work as well as if not better than traditional regulatory approaches. The governance agenda demands much more from the Commission, European Parliament, the national administrations and the European policy networks than is commonly supposed. In fact, surprisingly little thought has been devoted to understanding what ‘governance’-based tools such as impact assessment and open methods of co-ordination demand of the administrative systems in the EU and more importantly, whether they are in fact ‘fit for purpose’. This was not how it was meant to be; governance was sold as a new way of ‘adding value’ to national level activities without the need for new administrative capacities in Brussels or at national level.

Based on a detailed study of the struggle to use governance instruments to build environmental thinking into all areas and levels of EU policymaking, we conclude that the debate about governance is infused with all sorts of implicit and unrealistic expectations: that there is a wide range of detailed information; that the information that authorities provide about themselves is reliable; that civil servants and politicians want to use the information; and that national authorities can learn from countries with entirely different social and economic circumstances. Transferring the lessons gained in one member state to another demands well-designed multilevel co-ordination mechanisms: EU networks have to be up and running; national and European administrations have to work together to implement changes across a range of policies.

To arrive at better European policies, administrative capacities need to be built in the member states and at EU level. The ‘bureaucracy-lite’ concept of governance thus ends up moving into all sorts of sensitive areas such as the fitness and capacity of national administrative systems. For example, the Commission cannot possibly assess the impact of new policies on its own; the other EU institutions have to be involved as well. If the Commission produces ‘better’ proposals but the member states ignore them, the whole exercise will have been pointless. On the contrary, the member states have to make sure that the Commission knows that they will pay attention to these efforts during the Council negotiations. There are now signs that the production of impact assessment information is being better co-ordinated between the EU institutions, but the links with the member state remain problematic. In fact the literature on policy co-ordination in the EU warns us that the member states are generally reactive and inefficient at co-ordinating, in which case the dichotomy between the governance agenda and the EU’s administrative reality is likely to be with us for a long while yet.

Politically, the discourse in the EU has moved to a new phase in which the policy machine is expected to wean itself off administratively burdensome instruments such as regulation and instead rely on lighter instruments of governance. But governance does not necessarily denote less administration, despite the political pledges to produce less and better policy. In economics this is known as the problem of ‘strategy and structure’. If you change the strategy, the structure should also be tackled. But by setting new and highly ambitious policy co-ordination goals that the governance instruments struggle to achieve in practice, the EU risks exacerbating the vicious circle of declining public distrust that the Commission’s white paper on governance addressed back in 2001.

• Adriaan Schout is a senior researcher at the Netherlands Institute of International Relations (‘Clingendael’) in The Hague. Andrew Jordan is a professor at the UK’s University of East Anglia, in Norwich. Their study ‘The Co-ordination of the European Union’ (Oxford University Press) was a joint winner of the 2007 Best Book prize from the University Association for Contemporary European Studies (UACES).

The European Union’s policy instrument of choice has been - and very largely remains - legislation. But under the heading of ‘governance’ the EU has started to search for new ways to ensure the quality and legitimacy of its policy outputs.