Even if one may agree with the possible criticism of the Lisbon process as being too vague in com-mitment or as lacking appropriate statistical techniques and indicators, the benchmarking system pro-vided by EUROSTAT seems to be sufficiently effective in warning against imminent failure. The...

.This article discusses the tensions between two aspects of institutional change in the EU: the adaptation of institutional arrangements with the prospect of the legitimization of Community governance within a policy-making arena on the one hand, and the external evaluation of these...

This article analyses the impact of the EU's new Constitutional Treaty on the parliaments of its member states, with specific focus on access to information and on monitoring compliance with the subsidiarity principle. The main argument of the article is that while the Constitutional Treaty will...

This paper looks at the introduction of the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) to EU policy-making. This new mode of governance has been developed over the last decade and has received considerable attention in the literature. However, much of this writing fails to put the OMC into the broader...

Processes of soft policy coordination in the EU and of Europeanization have in recent years mostly been conceptualised in terms of learning. The OMC is mostly seen as inducing ideational, cognitive and possibly normative learning between member states. However, the generalised learning...

In this article, we analyse the development of new modes of governance in EU employment and social policy over the past two decades. In this field, a number of innovations can be observed. First, with the Maastricht Treaty, the right to draw up legislation was given to European social partners....

This paper is interested in the role of knowledge as resource, medium and product of governance as well as in ways of studying knowledge and processes of knowledge construction in EU governance. Its particular focus in this context is on the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) and the Lisbon...

Tackling pensions' problems means engaging with what Pierson (2001) has called 'immovable objects'. Additionally, the EU competence for drafting specific legislation in this area remains unfulfilled potential, while EU legislation in other policy areas creates indirect pressures on national...

As the European Union (EU) has strengthened, scholars have emphasized the development of multilevel governance structures and the salience of subnational actors. With the launch of the Open Method of Coordination and the increasing development of non-binding regulations, we must re-consider the...

This introduction provides a brief overview of the existing OMC literature with regard to the introduction of the OMC, its theoretical conceptualisation of effectiveness and legitimacy and related empirical findings. The main part of the introduction, however, focuses on chosen shortcomings of...