Governing EU employment policy: does collaborative governance scale up?

Abstract

In the European Union (EU), employment policy is a prerogative of the member states. Therefore the EU’s ability to govern in this area depends on its capability to involve national governments and relevant stakeholders in a collaborative effort to formulate and implement shared policy objectives. Drawing an analytical distinction between cooperation, coordination and collaboration, the article analyses the formulation and implementation of EU employment policies. It concludes that while the formulation of policy objectives and the discussion of national policy approaches do involve elements of collaboration, the implementation phase mainly consists in the less demanding forms of cooperation and coordination.

Broadening environmental governance ontologies to enhance ecosystem-based management in Aotearoa New Zealand

“…Investigations of place-specific governance arrangements and their interactions with regional, national, and international governance regimes exemplify the challenges of governance across multiple scales and multiple (often conflicting) interests (Lemos and Agrawal 2006;van der Molen 2018). Questions of how governance scales and the scalar processes that constitute scales of governance (including what an 'appropriate' scale is) have informed research focused on hybrid, polycentric, network, and multi-level governance, with researchers delineating interactions and relationships among organisations, actors, and institutions to determine how governance arrangements are shaped by social and political systems and dynamics and how they operate across scales (Bodin 2017;Kooiman 2003;Nunan 2018;Ostrom 2012;Sørensen et al 2015). The challenges of governing across multiple scales are amplified in multi-use marine environments, which are often characterised as giving rise to fragmentation as well as governance gaps (Alexander and Haward 2019;Stephenson et al 2019).…”

“…The emergence of hybrid governance configurations, such as co-governance arrangements to regulate people, places, and activities, represents a shift away from models that assume the state as the primary actor capable of regulating outcomes to achieve management or conservation objectives (Lemos and Agrawal 2006;Parsons and Fisher 2020;van der Molen 2018). Interest in understanding collaborative forms of governance, including power asymmetries and where collaboration has not lived up to expectations (Parsons et al 2021a), has led to efforts to define and characterise the relationships and interactions between different organisations or groups, for example, as cooperation (where ideas, knowledge and skills are exchanged), coordination (where synergies are emphasised and efforts are taken to reduce unintended consequences), and collaboration (institutionalised interaction among actors working towards shared goals) (Sørensen et al 2015).…”

Agents, Techniques, and Tools of Projectification

“…First, the context involves several tiers of government, creating "space to manoeuvre"' for the initiation and/or installation of mediators. Second, as the implementation of EU project funds is based on a voluntary coordination at a sub-national level (Bruno et al, 2006, p. 52), it creates incentives for local and regional governments to comply with and join common policy goals thus installing functions or engaging in processes to do so (see Sørensen & Triantafillou, 2015;Carlsson & Mukhtar-Landgren, 2018). Third, and more generally, "the EU project world" (Büttner & Leopold, 2016) is important to study on the local and practical level because EU projects are widely implemented and affect thousands of European civil servants, organisations, and citizens.…”

Re-compartmentalizing local policies? The translation and mediation of European structural funds in Sweden

“…Within the frame of these forms of soft co-ordination, the EU's ability to govern is dependent on its capacity to involve relevant stakeholders in different ways (Sørensen and Triantafillou 2015). In other words, these 'non-coercive processes' are based on the will of local and regional actors to participate and agree on common political objectives (cf.…”