Coordinated European Governance: Self‐Organizing or Centrally Steered?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.0033-3298.2005.00444.x |
| Author | Andrew Jordan,Adriaan Schout |
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
Public Administration Vol. 83 No. 1, 2005 (201–220)
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005, 9600 Garsi ngton Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,
Malden, MA 02148, USA.
COORDINATED EUROPEAN GOVERNANCE:
SELF-ORGANIZING OR CENTRALLY STEERED?
ADRIAAN SCHOUT AND ANDREW JORDAN
Now that it is widely accepted that the European Union (EU) constitutes a system of
governance, analysts need actively to explore precisely how it may affect the continu-
ing struggle better to coordinate national and European administrations. In its 2001
White Paper on governance, the European Commission interpreted governance to
mean less central control and more network-led steering. Its interpretation of such
networks is that they are self-organizing. Drawing upon an empirical study of envi-
ronmental policy integration (EPI) in the EU, this article shows that this vision may
not adequately fit the multi-actor, multi-level coordination challenges associated
with some EU problems. By studying the administrative capacities that the European
Commission and three member states have created to achieve better environmental
coordination, t his article shows significant administrative weaknesses. It concludes
that the coordination challenges now troubling the EU require a more thoughtful dis-
cussion of network management than the White Paper suggests.
INTRODUCTION
The European Union (EU) is at a crossroads in various respects. Both the
enormous challenge of enlargement and the bottlenecks resulting from the
successes of the European integration process call for profound adaptations.
EU policy-making was already becoming bogged down long before enlarge-
ment (the position of the Commission has been progressively weakened by
internal troubles and overload), but recent conflicts over, inter alia, the stabil-
ity and growth pact, indicate that states are becoming even less willing to be
‘disciplined’ by the EU. Greater differentiation, a weak centre and less
willingness to implement policies in a top-down fashion, have forced the EU
to consider new ways of ensuring adequate policy coordination. It has, for
example, pledged to adopt a formal constitution, which addresses import-
ant institutional issues such as voting powers and the size of the Commis-
sion, as well as ‘new’ forms of lawmaking. Importantly, it is also searching
for ways to implement a more modern form of governance based on
networks. The Commission’s thinking on this matter was published in the
2001 White Paper on European governance (COM (2001) 428 final).
Thus far, the governance debate in the EU has been strongly based on
the – often implicit – ideological assumption that networks are essentially
Adriaan Schout is Associate Professor at the European Institute of Public Administration in Maastricht
and Senior Researcher at the Clingendael European Studies Programme, The Hague. While working
on this paper, he also worked at the OU-NL in Heerlen. Andrew Jordan is Philip Leverhulme Prize
Fellow at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.
202 ADRIAAN SCHOUT AND ANDREW JORDAN
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2005
self-steering. In the context of European networks, self-organization – or
self-steering – can be defined as a process through which actors involved
identify their mutual interdependence, formulate and implement shared
strategies (which involves gathering and analysing information, setting
priorities and solving problems), and build the required organizational
structures at network and actor level. The purpose of this article is both to
make this assumption more explicit and to test its applicability by relating it
to a detailed empirical example of an EU policy problem that demands
vastly greater coordination between policy fields, namely environmental
protection. Inter- and intra-institutional coordination as well as coordination
within networks, are emerging as important new research themes in EU
studies (Kassim et al. 2000; Christiansen 2001; Peters and Wright 2001). We
argue that the White Paper, and the debate it triggered, have thus far missed
an important fact, that is, that European governance is too difficult a chal-
lenge for the EU to rely entirely on an arm’s-length approach to network
management. This observation has far-reaching consequences for how EU
governance is seen and, following from this, for the role of the Commission
and for the capacities that the myriad actors involved in the EU’s increas-
ingly multilevel governance system require to co-ordinate their respective
activities.
The White Paper has provided a much needed opportunity to discuss in
more detail the future shape of public administration in Europe. In the
course of his work, Les Metcalfe (1992, 2000) has consistently urged the EU
consciously to address this important topic. In particular, he has, albeit in
very general terms, successfully underlined the need for the EU to address
the need for greater network management to respond to policy coordination
challenges. We will attempt to show, however, that reality can be even more
complicated than he suggests, because, inter alia, the Commission’s role rep-
resents only one piece of a very complicated jigsaw of mutual interdepend-
encies. Crucially, member states also have important organizational issues
to consider when governance spans many policy sectors and administrative
levels, and encompasses many different actors.
A review of the literature shows that most scholars agree that since the EU
should be understood as a system of governances; the way seems clear for a
more focused debate to take place on what it may imply for the day-to-day
operation of public administration in Europe. At the very least, analysts now
need to identify what governance implies for managing the relations within
and between different national and European actors. Deepening the Euro-
pean governance debate will involve studying the interrelations between the
coordination systems of the national actors, of the European actors and of the
networks, as well as the administrative requirements that have to be met to
achieve any new policy coordination goals that the EU sets for itself. To date,
very few multilevel administrative studies of this nature have been pro-
duced, which may go some way to explain the faith that some people con-
tinue to place in the EU’s ability to steer with only a light touch of the tiller.
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