Exploring Governance in a Multi-Level Polity: A Policy Instruments Approach

Abstract

The study of public policy instruments in national settings has contributed significantly to our understanding of policy, political systems, and relations between state and citizen. Its promise for the EU, where instrument-centred research has hitherto been limited in coverage and method, remains by contrast largely unfulfilled. This article discusses the political sociology approach to instruments, developed by Lascoumes and Le Galès as an alternative to the traditional functionalist perspective, and highlights its value in opening new perspectives on EU policy-making and its consequences. It presents an overview of the findings of an original set of case studies, which demonstrate the usefulness of the approach in providing new insights on classic questions of EU decision-making, uncovering hidden dimensions of EU policy development, and revealing the limits of the organisational capacity of the EU as a system, as well as challenging established narratives.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Renaud Dehousse for the idea that originally led to the collaboration on which this special issue is based and to the ‘Connecting Excellence’ network (‘CONNEX’), funded under the EU Sixth Framework Programme and coordinated by Beate Kohler-Koch, for the sponsorship of two workshops. We should like to thank the participants who attended these meetings at the Centre d'Etudes Européennes, Sciences Po, Paris, 20–21 June 2007 and the School of Political, Social and International Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich, 28–29 May 2008. We are especially grateful to Dionyssis G. Dimitrakopoulos, who acted as discussant at the former, and to Simon Bulmer, Andrea Lenschow, and Pauline Ravinet for their very valuable contributions. We would like to thank Anne Meuwese, Claudio Radaelli, and Adriaan Schout for helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this article. The month (July 2009) in which the manuscript for this special issue was completed has particular significance for us. We often think about Vincent Wright, as a former supervisor, collaborator and friend. It is difficult to believe that he died ten years ago. We greatly miss his energy, enthusiasm and intelligence.

Notes

1. In agriculture, for example, Grant notes (2010: 33) that: ‘Standard accounts of the CAP have often either neglected policy instruments or treated them as secondary administrative devices, neglecting their capacity to be tools for understanding policy change and power relations'.

2. Not everyone falls into this trap. Schout, Jordan and Twela (2010) distinguish between networked instruments and networks.

3. Here the approach draws on the new institutionalism (March and Olsen 1984).

4. See also Salamon (2002: 2), who discusses the ‘political economy’ of tools of public action.

5. The EU, as a reflexive organisation aiming to increase its legitimacy, unsurprisingly included governance among the research priorities of the Sixth Research Framework Programme. ‘Governance’ featured prominently in the CONNEX (Connecting Excellent) network and NEWGOV (New Governance). Indeed, many of the contributions to this special issue were originally presented at meetings of those networks.

6. In the case of the origins of the CAP, for example, Knudsen (2006) has shown how the instruments adopted came from Germany and France. By contrast, deficiency payments, the main British instrument, were not even considered. Progressively, the adopted instruments shaped the policy and the collective capacity to change the policy. Similarly, Véronique Dimier (2003) in her research on the EU's development policy has shown how French colonial policy essentially shifted from Paris to Brussels in 1958, which led to the enactment of Community policy through French methods and instruments.

7. His conclusion is that instruments ‘deserve a more central place in public policy analysis’ (Grant 2010: 33).

8. On this point, see March and Simon (1958, 1978), March and Olsen (1979) and Cohen et al. (1972).

9. This is because ‘all reforms since 1992 have tried to address the market imbalances created by the original policy instruments based on price support’ leading to ‘a progressive introduction of new instruments’ (Garzon 2006: 51).

10. Hence, the paradox discussed by Jordan et al. (2005), mentioned above.

11. Grant (2010: 33) notes: ‘The original policy instruments were generally dysfunctional, but reframing the policy in terms of a multifunctionality paradigm permitted the development of more efficacious instruments’.