Towards a network governance of European lifelong learning: a structural analysis of Commission expert groups

ABSTRACT

The influence of the European Commission (EC) expert groups on policy coordination within the European Union has received a growing interest among researchers, who have assessed their role in policy-making processes, their participation patterns, their transparency, and their knowledge-generating process. This article interrogates the structural configuration of the networks, and the relationships between the actors, formed through the Commission expert groups on adult learning, and under the Education and Training 2020 work programme, respectively, by means of a Social Network Analysis. So attention is paid on the mutual-constitutivness of a social network and its members, or the potential power within a network, and of a network, to influence member states’ domestic adaptation of communitarian policies. Our analysis points at noticeable differences between the connectivity of each of the Commission expert groups, and the groups emerging from the two forms of network governance these produce in the adult learning, and education and training domains. A key result, however, is that two actors (i.e. Flemish Department for Education and Training, Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland) stand out as fully embedded in both forms of network governance, and represent highly connected ‘informal’ brokers across policy domains.

KEYWORDS:

• Adult education
• European governance
• European Commission
• expert groups
• Social Network Analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The data, the content, the tables, and the figures of this section appeared already in Milana, Tronca & Klatt (2019).

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No [693989].

Notes on contributors

Marcella Milana

Marcella Milana is Associate Professor in Education at the University of Verona, Italy. Her research deals with the politics, policy and governance of adult education and learning, from comparative and global perspectives. She is a joint editor of the International Journal of Lifelong Education (Taylor & Francis), and editor-in-chief of The Palgrave International Handbook on Adult and Lifelong Education and Learning (Macmillan, 2018).

Gosia Klatt

Gosia Klatt is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Vocational and Educational Policy at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education (MGSE) at the University of Melbourne. She has political science background but her current academic and practical interest lie in the field of education policy, education systems, vocational education, transitions from school, post-communist transitions, Europeanization and intergovernmental relations in Australia and Europe.

Luigi Tronca

Luigi Tronca is Full Professor of General Sociology at the University of Verona, Italy. His theoretical and empirical research is devoted to the study of social capital, consumption, the third sector, and governance models. He is a member of the editorial board of Sociologia e politiche sociali (FrancoAngeli) and Italian Sociological Review (QuiEdit).