A Modified Open Method of Coordination in Corporate Governance

The present paper is inspired by the increased application of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) into several policy areas, such as immigration and employment. The OMC has been lately in the epicenter of numerous academic debates related to the rationalization and the effectiveness of the involvement of EU bodies in areas of national competence. While the origins of the method and the domain of its primary application is the European Employment Strategy (EES), the innovation of the present paper is the proposed application of the method into a new area of growing EU interest, namely corporate governance. Against this backdrop, we touch upon the theoretical dynamics of the method and we initiate the debate on whether the OMC should be applied in the general area of company law or in a more narrow aspect of it, ie corporate governance. Our findings are based on a pros and cons analysis, welcoming, in principle, the proposed application of the OMC in the area of corporate governance, as a means to stimulate cross-pollination, experience sharing and promote legal certainty. Importantly, we provide evidence that the EU has applied the method in the broader area of corporate governance well before it gave it a name and we argue for an institutionalization of the OMC through the European Corporate Governance Forum (ECGF), as a body for peer review and experience sharing