Transcript A Decade of Innovation in EU Governance: The EES, the OMC

A Decade of Innovation
in EU Social Governance
Jonathan Zeitlin
University of Wisconsin-Madison
March 2008
Outline of the talk
• I. The European Employment Strategy (EES) as
an EU governance innovation
• II. From the EES to the Open Method of
Coordination (OMC)
• III. The OMC in action
• IV. The OMC and the Lisbon Strategy relaunch
• V. Closing the implementation gap through
better governance?
• VI. Reorienting the relaunch
• VII. Post-mortem and future prospects
2
I. The European Employment Strategy
as an EU governance innovation
• The EES originated from a combination of:
– Widespread uncertainty among EU MS on how to
combat persistent high unemployment
• 1993 Delors White Paper, 1994 Essen common action plan
– Political spillover from EMU
• Demand for an employment chapter in EU Treaty to sustain
public support for European integration
– European advocacy coalition committed to a more
active role for the EU in employment policy
• Commission, Parliament, MS gov’ts (esp. Sweden)
• Consolidated by political changes in key MS (UK, France)
3
The EES as a political compromise
• Like employment chapter of Amsterdam Treaty,
the EES or ‘Luxembourg Process’ launched in
November 1997 was a political compromise
• Focused around four ‘pillars’: employability,
adaptability, entrepreneurship, equal gender
opportunities
• Not only built on common employment policy
priorities (agreed at Essen in 1994), but also
combined ideas from social democratic, liberal,
and ‘Third Way’ approaches
4
The EES as a procedural solution
• Amsterdam Treaty authorized EU to coordinate
MS policies towards achieving a ‘high level of
employment’, but granted it no new legislative or
spending powers
• EES sought to square this circle by developing a
new iterative process of benchmarking national
progress towards common European objectives,
supported by organized mutual learning
5
The EES as a new governance
architecture
• EES as a new governance architecture based
on a recurring annual cycle
– Establishment of common but non-binding guidelines,
targets, and indicators
– National Action Plans, assessing relative progress
and proposing corrective action where needed
– Peer review of NAPs by MS reps in Employment
Committee (EMCO), supported by contextualized
exchange of good practices
– Joint Employment Report and country-specific
recommendations
– Review and revision of guidelines, targets, indicators,
and procedures in light of implementation experience
6
The EES as an innovative
approach to EU governance
• Built and improved on methods for coordination
of MS policies developed during the 1990s
– ‘Essen procedure’ of annual reporting on national
progress towards common EU employment priorities,
but with stronger and more systematic guidance,
monitoring, and evaluation of MS policies
– Broad Economic Policy Guidelines & EMU
convergence programs, but with greater emphasis on
adaptation of common European approaches to
diverse national circumstances and mutual learning
– Quickly recognized as an innovative approach to EU
governance by Commission as well as academics
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II. From the EES to the OMC
• The Open Method of Coordination introduced at
the extraordinary European Council of March
2000 as a broadly applicable new governance
instrument for the EU
• Designed to assist in achieving the ambitious
goals of the ‘Lisbon Strategy’: ‘to make the EU
the most dynamic and competitive knowledgebased economy in the world, capable of
sustainable economic growth, with more and
better jobs and greater social cohesion’
8
OMC as a new
governance architecture
• OMC defined at Lisbon as a new governance
architecture involving four key elements:
– ‘Fixing guidelines for the Union combined with specific timetables for
achieving the goals which they set in the short, medium and long term;
– establishing, where appropriate, quantitative and qualitative indicators
and benchmarks against the best in the world and tailored to the needs
of different Member States and sectors as a means of comparing best
practices;
– translating these European guidelines into national and regional policies
by setting specific targets and adopting measures, taking into account
national and regional differences;
– periodic monitoring, evaluation and peer review organized as mutual
learning processes.’
• Modeled directly on the EES
9
Diffusion and dilution
• Lisbon European Council authorized application
of the OMC to a wide range of policy areas
– R&D/innovation, information society/eEurope,
enterprise promotion, structural economic reform,
social inclusion, education/training
• Subsequently extended to various other fields,
including pensions, health/long-term care, youth
policy, better regulation, industrial relations
• But many of these ‘OMCs’ included only
fragmentary elements of the four-stage
governance architecture defined at Lisbon
10
Theoretical promise of a
new mode of governance
• OMC widely hailed by policy makers and
academics as a ‘third way’ for EU governance,
between harmonization/centralization and
regulatory competition/fragmentation
• A mechanism for reconciling pursuit of European
objectives with respect for national diversity
through iterative benchmarking of performance
against common indicators
• An instrument for promoting experimental
learning and deliberative problem solving
through systematic comparison of different
national approaches to similar problems
11
OMC as an EU policy template
• During the years immediately following the
Lisbon Summit, the OMC rapidly became the
governance instrument of choice for EU policy
making in complex, domestically sensitive areas
– where the Treaty base for Community action is weak
– where inaction is politically unacceptable
– where diversity among Member States precludes
harmonization
– where widespread strategic uncertainty recommends
mutual learning at the national as well as European
level
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III. The OMC in action
• National influence and effectiveness of OMC processes
is notoriously hard to evaluate
• Methodological problems of assessing the causal impact
of an iterative policy-making process based on
collaboration between EU institutions and MS
governments without legally binding sanctions
• But now a large body of empirical research, based on
both official and independent sources
– Zeitlin & Pochet 2005; Heidenreich & Zeitlin forthcoming
• Focused on employment and social inclusion: oldest,
most developed, best institutionalized OMC processes
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OMC in employment and social
inclusion: a qualified success
• Contributions to substantive policy change
– Cognitive shifts: incorporating EU concepts into
domestic debates, exposing policy makers to new
approaches, challenging entrenched assumptions
– Political shifts: putting new issues on the domestic
agenda and/or raising their relative salience
– Policy shifts: changes in specific laws/programs
• A two-way interaction rather than a one-way
causal impact
– Active role of MS in shaping the development of OMC
processes (‘uploading’) and selectively interpreting
their message (‘downloading’)
14
OMC in employment/inclusion:
a qualified success (2)
• Procedural shifts in governance/policymaking
– Better horizontal integration across policy areas
– Improved statistical and steering capacity
– Enhanced vertical coordination between levels of
governance
– Increased involvement of non-state actors
• Particularly strong in social inclusion
• Uneven but growing participation in employment
– Development of horizontal/diagonal networks for
participation of non-state/subnational actors in EU
policy making
15
OMC in employment and inclusion:
a qualified success (3)
• Mutual learning
– Identification of common challenges and promising
policy approaches
– Enhanced awareness of policies, practices, and
problems in other MS
– Statistical harmonization and capacity building at both
national and EU levels
– MS stimulated to rethink own approaches/practices,
as a result of comparisons with other countries and
ongoing obligations to re-evaluate national
performance against European objectives
16
OMC in employment and
social inclusion: limitations
• Lack of openness and transparency
– Dominant role of bureaucratic actors in OMC
processes at both EU and national level
• Weak integration into national policy making
– NAPs as reports to EU rather than operational plans
– Low public awareness and media coverage
• Little bottom-up/horizontal policy learning
– Few examples of upwards knowledge transfer and
cross-national diffusion from innovative local practice
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A reflexive reform strategy
• Overcome limitations of existing OMC processes
by applying method to its own procedures
– Benchmarking, peer review, monitoring, evaluation,
iterative redesign
• Ongoing reforms as evidence of practical
viability
– Strengthening of peer review/mutual learning
programs
– Efforts by EU institutions to promote greater
openness, stakeholder participation, and
‘mainstreaming’ of OMCs into domestic policy making
18
Advancing the European knowledge
economy through OMC: a failure?
• Weak performance of innovation/information society
initiatives within Lisbon Strategy
– Lack of progress towards 3% R&D target
– Limited impact/visibility of eEurope policies
• ‘Lite’ OMC recipes and fragmentary architectures
– European Action Plans, objectives, targets, indicators,
benchmarking/scoreboards
– But no agreed National Action Plans, systematic
monitoring/reporting, peer review, or country-specific
recommendations; weak mutual learning mechanisms
– External evaluation (Tavistock Institute et al. 2005):
OMC in these areas ‘cannot yet be said to be a success or
failure’: ‘simply has not been fully implemented’
19
IV. The OMC and
the Lisbon Strategy relaunch
• 2004-5 mid-term review sharply criticized both
the overarching design of Lisbon Strategy and
the role of OMC within it
• Kok Report (2004)
– Slow progress towards Lisbon goals
– Too many objectives, targets, indicators, processes
– Weakness of OMC in mobilizing MS commitment and
providing incentives for policy delivery
– Called for refocusing Lisbon Strategy on growth and
jobs, supported by intensified peer pressure on MS
(naming/shaming/faming, league tables)
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Commission Lisbon New Start (2005)
• Endorsed Kok critique of OMC & Lisbon I
• Rejected naming/shaming/faming in favor of
new reform partnerships between Commission
and MS, and between national governments and
domestic stakeholders
• Proposed shift from sectoral, multilateral policy
coordination (OMC) to integrated, bilateral
dialogue on national reform programs
21
The mid-term review as an
evidence-based process?
• Kok High Level Group
– Lacked expertise on social and employment
policies
– Did not review available evidence on OMC
performance in these areas
• Commission Lisbon New Start
– Ignored both internal & external evidence on
successes/failures of different OMC
processes
22
Integrating the economic and
employment guidelines
• Architectural core of relaunched Lisbon Strategy:
fusion of EGs and BEPGs into 24 Integrated
Guidelines, in 3 chapters (macroeconomic,
microeconomic, employment)
• Main thrust of EES preserved, including links to
overarching objectives (full employment, quality
& productivity at work, social cohesion), but at
cost of increased complexity and overlap
• NAPs/empl and Joint Employment Report
replaced by sections within MS Lisbon National
Reform Programs (NRPs) and Commission
Annual Progress Report
23
Saving and streamlining
the social OMCs
• Social cohesion/inclusion reinstated within
Lisbon II by European Council (2005-7)
– Following a successful campaign by social NGOs
• Social Protection OMCs reaffirmed
– Inclusion, pensions, health/long-term care
– 3 strands streamlined into a single process
(OMC/SPSI) w/ both common and specific objectives
• OMC and Lisbon: a mutually reinforcing dynamic
– Social OMCs to ‘feed into’ growth/jobs at nat’l & EU
levels; IGs/NRPs to ‘feed out’ to social cohesion goals
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V. Closing the implementation gap
through better governance?
• Results of Lisbon II not encouraging
• Erosion of employment policy coordination
– Reduced visibility at both EU & national levels
– Increased unevenness in national reporting
and loss of EU-level monitoring capacity
– Uneven/variable format of NRPs hampers
feedback of mutual learning into MS policy
making
25
‘Feeding-in/out’ in practice
• Limited effectiveness of mutually reinforcing
dynamic, with wide variations across MS
• Few NRPs include social cohesion/inclusion
objectives among national priorities
• Little reference to OMC/SPSI in NRPs
• Little evidence of ‘feeding-out’
– e.g. through systematic impact assessment of effects
of economic/employment policies on social outcomes
26
Enhancing national ownership and
civil society participation?
• A key objective of Lisbon II
• Most independent assessments agree that 2005 NRP
process did not realize these goals
• A backward step for civil society participation compared
to NAPs/empl, and esp. NAPs/incl
• Big push from Commission for increased national
ownership in 2006-2007 NRP implementation process
– Leads to creation of new consultative/coordination bodies,
upgrading of Lisbon coordinators, wider involvement of national
parliaments, social partners, local/regional authorities
• But still little involvement of civil society actors (e.g.
social NGOs) and low public visibility in most MS
27
Simplification or specificity?
• Growth & jobs closely linked to other policy
areas with separate coordination processes
– social protection/inclusion, education/training,
environment/sustainable development
• Loss of specificity & detailed reporting against
common indicators needed to monitor, evaluate,
and coordinate complex policy areas
– e.g. employment
• Incorporating key objectives & indicators from
other sectoral processes is not like adding
ornaments to a Christmas tree, but rather using
full range of instruments to avoid flying blind
28
VI. Reorienting the relaunch
• New cycle of IGs (2008-2011)
– An opportunity to correct deficiencies of
relaunched Lisbon governance architecture
revealed by experience of past three years
• 2 key areas of proposed reform
– Strengthening Lisbon’s social dimension
– Reviving the European Employment Strategy
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Strengthening Lisbon’s
social dimension
– European Council has repeatedly affirmed
that greater social cohesion & fight against
poverty/social exclusion remain core Lisbon
objectives
– But this political commitment has not been
reflected in guidelines to MS for preparation of
NRPs, nor in their assessment
– 2007 Spring Council resolved that ‘common
social objectives of MS should be better taken
account within the Lisbon Agenda’
30
Improving policy coherence
and discovering synergies
• European systems of social protection need
ongoing reform to ensure their adequacy,
sustainability, and adaptation to new risks
• OMC/SPSI designed to pursue these multiple,
indispensable goals in a balanced, coherent
way, incorporating both social & economic views
• But Lisbon II has returned to one-sided
coordination of MS social policies in pursuit of
economic & employment goals, which
OMC/SPSI was created to overcome
31
Policy options for a stronger social
dimension
1. Incorporate both EU’s common social
objectives and OMC/SPSI into IGs and NRPs
2. Incorporate EU social objectives more
explicitly into the IGs, while retaining the
OMC/SPSI as a distinct policy
coordination/reporting process
3. Leave existing structure of IGs and OMC/SPSI
unchanged, while improving arrangements for
‘feeding-in/out’ at both national and EU levels,
through enhanced participation, reporting, and
impact assessment requirements
32
Option 1: full incorporation of social
objectives & OMC/SPSI into IGs/NRPs
• Advantages
– The cleanest and most coherent solution
– Would place EU’s social objectives on equal footing
with pursuit of growth & jobs
– Would create an integrated institutional framework for
reconciling conflicts/discovering synergies between
objectives at both national and EU levels
• Disadvantages
– Risk of weakening EU social policy coordination by
reducing its autonomy & visibility
33
Option 3: advantages
& disadvantages
• Advantages
– The simplest and least risky solution
– Reinforced social participation, reporting, & impact
assessment requirements are both desirable per se,
and necessary for effective working of Options 1 & 2
• Disadvantages
– Experience under Lisbon II suggests that proposed
improvements in ‘feeding-in/out’ will remain ineffective
without changes in the structure of IGs
– Most MS have ignored exhortations from the EC to
highlight ‘feeding-in/out’ in their NRPs, as has the
Commission in its own Annual Progress Report
34
Option 2: incorporating social objectives but
not OMC/SPSI into the IGs
• Advantages
– The most promising approach to strengthening the
social dimension of the Lisbon Strategy while
preserving the visibility and autonomy of EU social
policy coordination
• Disadvantages
– Still some risk of reducing autonomy of OMC/SPSI
– But retaining procedural autonomy while sacrificing
political influence is the greater risk, since MS are
already subject to one-sided coordination of social
protection reforms under the IGs for Growth & Jobs
35
Restructuring Lisbon governance
• Incorporation of social objectives into the IGs
should be accompanied by broader
organizational changes to Lisbon Strategy
governance, aimed at safeguarding the integrity
of OMC/SPSI as a distinct sectoral process
• IGs & NRPs should be reconceived as twin
apexes of an overarching policy coordination
process built up from sectoral OMCs
– Sites where conflicting priorities can be reconciled,
not centralized replacements for sectoral coordination
processes themselves
36
Reviving the EES
• Such organizational changes would be
beneficial for the Lisbon Strategy as a whole,
and should be extended to the EES to correct
the problems experienced under Lisbon II
– Loss of visibility, monitoring capacity, participatory
impetus
• As with the OMC/SPSI, would be desirable to
revive the EES and NAPs/empl as distinct policy
coordination processes and planning documents
preceding and flowing into NRPs
37
Maximizing opportunities
for mutual learning
• To maximize opportunities for mutual learning,
MS should be obliged to report consistently on
progress towards each objective/guideline, using
common European indicators as far as possible
– Common indicators should be outcome-oriented,
responsive to policy interventions, subject to clear/
accepted normative interpretation, timely, & revisable
– Indicators should also be sufficiently comparable &
disaggregable to serve as diagnostic tools for
improvement & self-correction by national/local
actors, rather than as soft sanctions/shaming devices
to ensure MS compliance with European targets
38
VII. Post-mortem
and future prospects
• Following a year of public debate, the March
2008 European Council endorsed a 4th option for
the new cycle of the Lisbon Strategy
– Leaving the current set of Integrated Guidelines
unchanged, in order to focus on national
implementation of commitments to structural reforms
– Strengthening the social dimension of the Lisbon
Strategy by revising the explanatory text
accompanying the Guidelines
39
The social dimension of the
new Integrated Guidelines
• IGs designed to contribute to social cohesion objectives
as well as sustainable growth and employment
• Need for strengthened interaction with the OMC/SPSI
• MS should ensure that developments in economics,
labor, and social affairs are mutually reinforcing through
broad stakeholder partnerships and systematic follow-up
• Modernization of social protection systems should
support their access and adequacy goals as well as
financial sustainability
• Active inclusion of all through promotion of labor force
participation and fight against poverty & exclusion
• MS encouraged to monitor social impact of reforms
40
A flawed solution
• 2008-10 Lisbon Guidelines have attracted wide
criticism from EP, ETUC, social NGOs, & others
• Disconnect between old guidelines and new
explanatory text does nothing to improve the
intelligibility of EU policies to MS citizens or
enhance ownership by national actors
• Remains to be seen how commitment to
promote greater synergy between IGs and
OMC/SPSI will be followed up and monitored
– E.g. through guidance to MS on preparation of NRPs
and development of ‘feeding in/feeding out’ indicators
41
Towards a post-Lisbon agenda
• Structural reforms of the governance
architecture of the Lisbon Strategy will now have
to await the next cycle of IGs, beginning in 2011
• But preparations for the ‘post-Lisbon’ era are
already underway, in the form of planning for the
EU’s next five-year Social Agenda
– Charged with strengthening the social dimension of
the Lisbon Strategy
– Reviewing governance instruments and policy tools in
response to new social risks and realities
42
Promoting active inclusion
• Modernizing social protection for greater social justice
and economic cohesion through active inclusion for
those furthest from the labor market
• A holistic strategy combining minimum income support
with job opportunities/vocational training and better
access to enabling social services of high quality
• Common EU principles to be adopted, as with flexicurity
• Commission to update 1992 recommendation on
minimum income schemes for MS
• Follow-up and monitoring through reinforced OMC,
with participation & integration of all relevant actors,
and establishment of a network of local observatories
43
Enhancing mutual learning
through OMC
• Ongoing proposals for enhancing mutual
learning through OMC (EMCO, SPC)
– Focus of peer review/mutual surveillance of national
strategy reports on key policy themes
• E.g. flexicurity, active inclusion, child poverty
– More context and process-oriented approach to peer
review of good and bad practices
– Stronger analytical framework for understanding
relationship between policies and outcomes
– Better linkages between EU and national debates
through improved dissemination, wider stakeholder
participation, and development of ‘learning networks’
44
An alternative pathway to realizing
Lisbon’s original promise?
• Comprehensive reforms to the governance architecture
of EU social, economic, and employment policy
coordination remain out of reach, at least for the moment
• But new integrative strategies such as active inclusion
and flexicurity, coupled with reflexive reform of OMC
processes, may meanwhile offer an alternative lowerprofile pathway to realizing Lisbon’s original promise
• Helping to create a mutually reinforcing relationship
between the EU’s core social, economic, & employment
policy objectives: greater social cohesion, faster
sustainable growth, and more and better jobs
45