In technically complex areas, political actors increasingly rely on private actors to shape public policy, due to the greater expertise of private actors. This article theorises and empirically investigates the conditions under which self-regulation by industry (governance) emerges in environmental policy at the European level and asks how effective it is. Is a shadow of hierarchy (governmental intervention) needed to ensure the emergence and effectiveness of voluntary agreements? We show that the willingness to engage in self-regulation is prompted by the threat of governmental legislation. Once legislation has been pre-empted, environmental self-regulation is implemented under a weak shadow of hierarchy. We identify the causes of this weak control and explain the differential performance in the two sectors on the basis of different market incentives.

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This symposium critically engages with the volume Experimentalist Governance in the European Union: Towards a New Architecture (2010), edited by Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin. "Experimentalist Governance" (EG) opens up an original theoretical perspective on the emergent governance architecture of the EU and sheds new light on developments in key policy sectors. This symposium brings together a transatlantic group of distinguished political scientists and legal scholars to discuss the added value of EG as a concept for analysis, its theoretical underpinnings, empirical relevance, and normative implications, in terms of legitimacy. Contributors discuss EG from different disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, referring to a variety of empirical examples in the EU context and beyond. The symposium closes with a response from the authors to their critics. This collection of essays sheds new light on debates around the nature of the EU and democratic governance beyond the nation state.

Postal regulation has changed dramatically within the European Union over the past decade. This article theorizes and empirically investigates domestic conditions which have shaped the institutional realization of regulatory reform. It seeks to explore how the commitment -control problem, inherent to any delegated setting, has been resolved in different countries. In which ways have national governments delegated regulatory powers to independent agencies and how do these operate in practice? Combining delegation theory and the variety of capitalism approach, expectations for three distinct varieties of delegation are formulated which are then exposed to empirical scrutiny studying the UK, Germany and France. The typology accounts for cross-country variance in de facto agency independence and regulatory practice, but contradicts patterns of formal delegation. In view of a striking discrepancy between formal arrangements and actual practice, the author makes a strong argument in favour of studying the dynamic and longitudinal effects of interaction.