European Governance

The Governance Approach in EU Studies

Rather than a theory in its own right, the notion of European governance has been largely portrayed as an approach that brings together different perspectives concerning the same phenomena, namely the complexity, diversity, and dynamism of interactions among a variety of actors generating collective and public action within this supranational or international polity, a polity which is in a permanent systemic development. Despite the wide spectrum of empirical areas in which it has been used, all uses of the governance approach within EU studies share one important feature, namely that the object of study is not the process of integration as such, but mainly the problems and questions that arise about how this new type of political system operates. Thus, the interest is not on the factors that explain the process of supranational institution building by the further transfer of national competences to Brussels but, rather, on the issues associated with the effectiveness, legitimacy, and sustainability of the collective political action undertaken in this new political order.

From the creation of the European Community in the 1950s until the mid-1990s, scholarly attention was overwhelmingly on explaining the advancement of the European integration process. The alternative theoretical frameworks, most notably neofunctionalism, liberal intergovernmentalism, and historic institutionalism, that had been developed during those years (particularly by U.S. scholars) have been largely related to wider debates within the field of international relations. Here, the rapid institution-building process of the European Communities or Union was seen as an advanced example of international cooperation and economic regionalization worldwide, whose study could provide answers to wider questions about international politics. In the 1990s, however, a new approach started to emerge. Acknowledging that the EU had now developed substantive public action in a wide variety of policy areas (such as agriculture, competition, trade, technology, consumer safety, environmental protection, transport, and foreign affairs), a growing number of scholars (particularly European scholars) became more concerned with issues related to decision-making and implementation processes in those policy areas, and also to the new and emerging patterns of collective public action at the EU level. This research focus is not primarily related to the area of international relations, but to the studies of public administration, policy analysis, and comparative politics, traditionally focused at the national level. Admittedly, the governance approach within EU studies has tended to use the analytical tools provided by those studies, by adapting them to the specific problems related to supranational and transnational political dynamics. Nevertheless, the true novelty of the governance approach within EU studies is that it has linked the analysis of these low-politics processes to the constitutional-systemic level by examining the normative dimensions and forms of political contestation that are involved in the constant polity construction of the EU as a postnational political order.

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