Forms of informality: Identifying informal governance in the European Union

Abstract

Informal governance has become a major form of public sector intervention into society and economy, but rather than being a single instrument, informal governance actually contains a number of different instruments and forms of intervention. This paper discusses the role of informal governance in the European Union and differentiates among the various forms of informal governance used. The variety of these instruments illustrates the importance of understanding the consequences of each and the existence even of contradictions among the forms. It further develops criteria for assessing those forms of intervention and focuses on questions of efficiency and accountability of informal governance.

Key Words:

• Governance
• policy instruments
• European Union

Notes

¹ Pardon the functionalist language, but it is used intentionally. One means of cutting into the complexity that surrounds a practice like governance is to think of it in functionalist terms and to examine the manner in which those functions are performed (see Peters, 2000; Pierre & Peters, 2005).

² Gary Freeman's by now classic argument is that the differences across policy areas are more significant than the differences across countries in the comparative study of policy. In this case, the differences across policies may be more significant than those between the European Union and constituent national governments (Freeman, 1985).

³ That having been said, state actors do often play a role in networks, no matter how formal or informal their official capacity may be.

⁴ Likewise, the Buchanan and Tullock argument about decision-making costs and exclusion costs in designing constitutional arrangements implies that the more actors that are involved in a decision the higher will be the decision-making costs. Thus, the increased in informality of policy making will tend to be related to greater difficulties in making decisions, especially when those modes of making decisions tend not to have formalised rules for making decisions (Buchanan & Tullock, 1962).

⁵ The development of multi-level governance as a means of making and delivering policy within the EU has the implication that, de facto if not de jure, some aspects of policy are being delegated to actors beneath the level of national and provincial governments, further enhancing the complexity of the arrangements and creating greater needs to monitor and control these governments as agents (Bache & Finders, 2004).

⁶ In some ways multi-level governance is not dissimilar to inter-governmental politics typical of federal political systems, and to some extent all political systems. In that regard multi-level governance is not really as novel as its ‘discoverers’ have made it appear.

⁷ This weakness in the specification of goals would, of course, disqualify this pattern as governance under the relatively strict criteria advanced at the outset of this paper. That having been said, examining the garbage can perspective does permit us to consider the full range of possible consequences of using informal means when attempting to govern within the EU.

⁸ Given that many of these officials are ministers, they generally have a democratic mandate of some sort, although it is not one especially for dealing with EU affairs.

⁹ The Commission may itself be divided, but this is usually at an earlier stage of internal bargaining and discussion among the DGs, often displaying the characteristics of ‘bureaucratic politics’ as the individual DGs utilise the decision situation as an opportunity to enhance their own position within the institutional framework (Page & Wouters, 1994).

¹⁰ Corporate pluralist political systems have developed mechanisms for coping with the possible difficulties in decision making because of the involvement of multiple actors in the political process.