Informal Governance In The European Union

How are the deals and decisions of the EU made - in the meeting rooms and at the conference tables, or by informal networks in the back corridors of power?

ÔThis volume provides a welcome overview of the diverse ways in which informal practices and norms shape policy in national states, the European Union, and international relations. The wide range of cases that feature in the volume point to the normative and substantive importance of informality. This volume is a valuable contribution to a fascinating and under-researched topic.Õ Ð Gary Marks, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, US and VU Amsterdam, The Netherlands Acknowledging that governance relies not only on formal rules and institutions but to a significant degree also on informal practices and arrangements, this unique Handbook examines and analyses a wide variety of theoretical, conceptual and normative perspectives on informal governance. The insights arising from this focus on informal governance are discussed from various disciplinary perspectives, within different policy domains, and in a number of regional and global contexts. This Handbook is an important contribution that will put informal governance firmly on the map of academic scholarship with its review of the range of the different uses and effects of informal arrangements across the globe. Bringing together multidisciplinary contributions on informal governance arrangements, this Handbook will appeal to postgraduate students in political science and scholars within the field of political science and global governance.

The study of European integration tends to focus on formal aspects of the integration process: formal decision-making procedures, the role and functioning of institutions, the provisions contained in the treaties, the operation of regulatory regimes in the various policy areas. This is hardly surprising: what is distinctive about the integration process in Europe - what distinguishes integration in Europe from international co-operation in other parts of the world - is the creation and growth of a unique institutional and legal framework structuring the relations between the participating states. An early and still important contribution to the understanding of the integration process has been the 'integration through law' school which regarded the development of a supranational legal order as the key factor in the explanation of the integration process (Cappoletti et al 1986). If the formalisation of inter-state relations is regarded as the essence of the integration process, it is hardly surprising that scholars should concentrate on the formal procedures and the institutionalised arenas for decision-making. However, as has become increasingly evident in the course of recent developments in the European Union, there is an important undercurrent to the formal integration process. This concerns the operation of informal networks which link policy-makers to client groups as well as actors across EU, national and sub-national institutions, and influence (or at least seek to influence) decision-making in the EU. This practice of informal governance is, of course, not a recent phenomenon, but a long-standing dimension of EU politics. This is a recognition that has been reflected by some approaches to European integration: in particular the literature on policy networks and the new institutionalism writing of the 1990s have picked up on the less formal aspects of the EU policy process. Nevertheless, informal governance has never been systematically studied and assessed: this is the void that this volume seeks to fill.

The European Union is the world’s most advanced international organization, presiding over a level of legal and economic integration unmatched in global politics. To explain this achievement, many observers point to its formal rules that entail strong obligations and delegate substantial power to supranational actors such as the European Commission. This legalistic view, Mareike Kleine contends, is misleading. More often than not, governments and bureaucrats informally depart from the formal rules and thereby contradict their very purpose. Behind the EU’s front of formal rules lies a thick network of informal governance practices. If not the EU’s rules, what accounts for the high level of economic integration among its members? How does the EU really work? In answering these questions, Kleine proposes a new way of thinking about international organizations. Informal governance affords governments the flexibility to resolve conflicts that adherence to EU rules may generate at the domestic level. By dispersing the costs that integration may impose on individual groups, it allows governments to keep domestic interests aligned in favor of European integration. The combination of formal rules and informal governance therefore sustains a level of cooperation that neither regime alone permits, and it reduces the EU’s democratic deficit by including those interests into deliberations that are most immediately affected by its decisions. In illustrating informal norms and testing how they work, Kleine provides the first systematic analysis, based on new material from national and European archives and other primary data, of the parallel development of the formal rules and informal norms that have governed the EU from the 1958 Treaty of Rome until today.

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Politics - Topic: European Union, University of Flensburg, course: Course „European Governance“, language: English, abstract: The concepts of governance have the advantage of including the informal aspect of decision-making into their scope of analysis. The intention of this paper is the application of a fitting conceptual derivative of governance on the decision making process inside the institutional framework of the Commission of the European Union. The notion to be tested is the one of the Commission being by its institutional heritage inclined to promulgation of consensus among its principal actors, the members of the college of Commissioners. So what kind of governance might be characteristic for the Commission? The political setting is that of the European Union, which is on the one hand an intergovernmental organization of member states on equal terms, but on the other hand a political institution. Apart from partly being established on a supra-national echelon, which is rationally designed and controlled for the purpose action and intervention to foster economic prosperity and integration in accordance with the concepts of functional and rational-choice institutionalism characteristic for social and political institutions of modernity. As the EU is itself an extension of the mostly politically pluralistic and socially fragmented Member States (MS), certain elements and processes influencing the promulgation of the political will on all legislative governmental echelons are present in the context of governance in the European Union as well. The hypothesis of this paper consists of the following notions: Due to the “sui generis”-character the EU,1 employing decisions by consensus even on intergovernmental as well as on supranational level is most effective politics possible. Applying concepts of governance to the Commission‟s competences, institutional framework and formal as well as , if perceptible, informal decision-making procedures and customs, will show that although the Commission matches no distinct concept currently present in academia, it very well fulfils basic requirements of „good‟ governance. Even as the supra-national institution per se, the Commission acts according to these notions.

Informal dimensions of European integration have received limited academic attention to date, despite their historical and contemporary importance. Particularly studies in European integration history, while frequently mentioning informal processes, have as yet rarely conceptualised the study of informality in European integration, and thus fail usually to systematically analyse conditions, impact and consequences of informal action. Including case studies that discuss both successful and failed examples of informal action in European integration, this book assembles cutting-edge research by both early-career and more experienced scholars from all over Europe to fill this lacuna. The chapters of this volume offer a guide to the study of informality and show how informality has impacted European integration history and the functioning of the EC/EU as well as other European organisations in a variety of ways. Reflecting the diversity of studies within this burgeoning field of research, within and across several academic disciplines, the book approaches the informal dimensions of European integration from different disciplinary, methodological and thematic angles. This book will be of key interest to students and scholars of European integration, EU politics/studies, European politics, European Union history, and more broadly to comparative politics and international relations.

The Transformation of Governance in the European Union presents a theoretically informed typology of modes of governance which is tested in a careful selection of comparative country and policy studies.