Transcript Is the OMC an Alternative to the Community Method?

Is the OMC an Alternative to
the Community Method?
Jonathan Zeitlin
University of Wisconsin-Madison
I. The OMC and
the Community Method
• Origins and definition
– Announced as a broadly applicable new governance
instrument for the EU at March 2000 Lisbon Summit
– Built on new Treaty-based policy coordination
processes introduced during the 1990s
• Broad Economic Policy Guidelines (BEPGs)
• European Employment Strategy (EES)
– OMC defined at Lisbon as a specific ensemble of
procedural elements involving iterative benchmarking
of national progress towards common European
objectives and organized mutual learning
• A 4-step governance architecture modeled on the EES
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Diffusion and procedural variations
• Lisbon European Council authorized application
of OMC to a wide range of policy areas:
– Including R&D/innovation, information
society/eEurope, enterprise promotion, social
inclusion, education/training
– OMCs later introduced in other fields, e.g. pensions,
health care, youth policy, better regulation, culture
• Wide procedural variations
– Many new OMC processes did not include full Lisbon
governance architecture, but only fragmentary
elements (e.g. European Action Plans, objectives,
targets, scoreboards, indicators, peer review, etc.)
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OMC as a new pathway for
European integration
• OMC explicitly conceived by its architects as a
new pathway for European integration
• Especially suited to complex, domestically
sensitive policy fields where there is a perceived
need for European action, but
– Treaty powers are weak, and the EU has limited
competences
– MS are reluctant to transfer new powers to the Union
– National diversity precludes harmonization
• A ‘third way’ between intergovernmentalism and
supranationalism (Larsson)
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OMC as a threat to
the Community Method
• Rapid diffusion of OMC after Lisbon  widely voiced
concerns that such‘soft-law’ procedures represent a
threat to the CM
– Defined as binding legislation initiated by the Commission,
enacted by the Council and the Parliament, and enforceable by
the ECJ
• Has led to repeated demands that OMC should not be
used when legislative action under the CM is possible
– E.g. White Paper on Governance (2001), debate on
constitutionalization of OMC at Convention on the Future of
Europe, EP resolution on the use of ‘soft law’ instruments (2007)
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Conflicting or complementary
approaches?
• OMC never intended to serve as sole
governance instrument for Lisbon Strategy
• Always supposed to be combined with full set of
EU policy tools (legislation, social dialogue,
Community Action Programs, structural funds)
• No evidence that OMC has displaced EU
legislation, even in the social policy field
– Rejection of Commission proposals for application of
OMC in immigration and asylum
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Interpenetration of OMC and
Community instruments
• Often an ‘integral continuity’ between OMC
objectives/guidelines and legally binding norms
embodied in EU directives (Kilpatrick)
• Directives often include non-mandatory
recommendations which may be enacted into national
law (Falkner)
– Part-time work, parental leave, gender equality, disability rights,
occupational pensions
• Growing programmatic integration of structural funds
with OMC objectives (employment, social inclusion)
• Use of EU community action programs (now unified as
PROGRESS) to support participation by non-state and
local/regional actors in EES and social inclusion OMC
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‘Hard’ vs. ‘soft’ law:
an elusive distinction
• ‘Hard-law’ directives increasingly incorporate
provisions for completion and periodic revision
through ‘soft-law’ OMC-style procedures
– Water Framework Directive (2000)
• Broad, open-ended goals: MS required to achieve ‘good
water status’ by 2015 through integrated basin management
• ‘Common Implementation Strategy’ for assisting MS in
achieving goals & reconciling diverse approaches
• Nested organization of EU, national, & non-state actors
• Regular reporting, monitoring, & evaluation of national plans
• Generates non-binding guidance documents, which can feed
into Commission legislative proposals & comitology decisions
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OMC and
experimentalist governance
• OMC as one element in a larger architecture of
experimentalist governance in the EU, which is
transforming the ‘Community Method’
– Based on recursive processes of framework rule
making and revision in light of practical experience of
implementation in diverse contexts through networked
deliberation among European and national actors
• Diffusion across multiple policy areas
– Telecoms, energy, drug authorization, occupational
health & safety, environmental protection, food safety,
maritime safety, financial services, competition, state
aid, anti-discrimination, fundamental rights (+ others)
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II. The OMC in Action
• Most widespread critique of OMC has focused less on
potential threat to the CM than on its limited
effectiveness & lack of impact on MS
• Much of this debate, both in academic and policy circles,
suffers from serious empirical deficits
– Reliance on narrow range of often outdated evidence/studies
– No systematic evaluation of OMC processes in mid-term review
of the Lisbon Strategy
• Compounded by methodological problems of assessing
the causal impact of an iterative policymaking process
based on collaboration between MS and EU institutions
without legally binding sanctions
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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 2005):
OMC in these areas ‘cannot yet be said to be a success or
failure’: ‘simply has not been fully implemented’
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The OMC in action:
employment and social inclusion
• Employment and social inclusion: most
fully developed and institutionalized OMC
processes
• Now a substantial body of empirical
research, based on both official and
independent sources
• Synthetic overviews in Zeitlin & Pochet
(2005); Heidenreich & Zeitlin (forthcoming)
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OMC in employment and social
inclusion: a qualified success
• Improvements in EU employment performance
– Structural improvements, 1997-2001
– Slower but continuing progress, 2002-6
– But connections to EES complex and uncertain
• Substantive policy change
– Increased political salience & ambition of national
employment and social inclusion policies
– Broad shifts in nat’l policy thinking (cognitive shifts)
– Changes in national policy agendas (political shifts)
– Some influence on specific reforms/programs
(policy shifts)
– Two-way interaction between OMCs and national
policies rather than one-way impact
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OMC in employment/inclusion:
a qualified success (2)
• Procedural shifts in governance/policymaking
– Horizontal integration across policy areas
– Improved statistical and steering capacity
– Vertical coordination between levels of governance
• Participation of non-state/subnational actors
– Particularly strong mobilization in social inclusion
– Uneven but growing participation in EES
– Social NGOs and local/regional authorities more
active than social partners
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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
– 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
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OMC in employment
and 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 of this approach
– Strengthening of peer review/mutual learning
programs (EES, social protection/inclusion)
– Proposals by EU institutions for greater openness,
stakeholder participation, and ‘mainstreaming’ of
OMCs into domestic policy making (2003-6)
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