The politics of governance architectures: creation, change and effects of the EU Lisbon Strategy

Abstract

Governance architectures are strategic and long-term institutional arrangements of international organizations exhibiting three features; namely, they address strategic and long-term problems in a holistic manner, they set substantive output-oriented goals, and they are implemented through combinations of old and new organizational structures within the international organization in question. The Lisbon Strategy is the most high-profile initiative of the European Union for economic governance of the last decade. Yet it is also one of the most neglected subjects of EU studies, probably because not being identified as an object of study on its own right. We define the Lisbon Strategy as a case of governance architecture, raising questions about its creation, evolution and impact at the national level. We tackle these questions by drawing on institutional theories about emergence and change of institutional arrangements and on the multiple streams model. We formulate a set of propositions and hypotheses to make sense of the creation, evolution and national impact of the Lisbon Strategy. We argue that institutional ambiguity is used strategically by coalitions at the EU and national level in (re-)defining its ideational and organizational elements.

Keywords:

• European integration
• governance
• institutions
• instruments
• Lisbon Strategy
• Open Method of Co-ordination

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to express our gratitude to the participants of the seminars held in Lisbon 2009 and Exeter 2010, as well as Renaud Dehousse, Bruno Dente, Patrick Le Galés, Jeremy Richardson, Vivien Schmidt and two anonymous referees for insightful comments on previous versions. Susana Borrás gratefully acknowledges support from the CBS World Class Initiative SONIC. Claudio Radaelli wishes to acknowledge funding from the European Research Council, grant on Analysis of Learning in Regulatory Governance no. 230267 (http://centres.exeter.ac.uk/ceg/research/ALREG/index.php) and the EC Centre of Excellence grant.

Notes

Some of them might have elements of conditionality if funding is related, like in the Poverty Reduction Strategy Programme (PRSP) of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Typical here is the discussion around impact assessment, as explained by Radaelli and Meuwese (2010).

‘Drift: The changed impact of existing rules due to shifts in the environment; Conversion: the changed enactement of existing rules due to their strategic redeployment’ (Mahoney and Thelen 2010: 16).

We are grateful to Jakob Edler for this comment.