Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
  • Publication
    Governing Without Law or Governing Without Government? New-ish Governance and the Legitimacy of the EU
    (Wiley, 2009-03)
    The way the EU is governed and the way such governance is perceived contributes centrally to the legitimacy of the European enterprise. This legitimacy underpins both the acceptance and the effects of EU activity. Legitimacy is a product of the way in which decisions are taken and the nature and quality of such decisions. Pressures created by concerns about both forms of legitimacy affecting EU decision making partially explain the turn in legal scholarship away from the more traditional preoccupation with the analysis of legislative instruments and case law towards a more broadly based conception of governance which involves the examination of a more diverse range of processes and instruments. This paper offers an analysis of the parameters of newness in governance. The overall argument is that some of the more innovative governance modes are not so new, whilst more recent and celebrated modes, although displaying elements of newness are, perhaps, not that innovative. The focus of the new governance in the European Union is largely on governing without law, rather than the more radical governing without government. Hence the suggestion that we are experiencing only 'new-ish governance'. The paper asks whether a limited conception of new governance is inevitable given the legitimacy constraints within which the EU operates, or is their potential for developing a broader conception of governance, which through wider participation and involvement of non-governmental governing capacities, might bolster legitimacy through both better processes and better outcomes?
    Scopus© Citations 27  936
  • Publication
    The Governance of the European Union: The Potential for Multi-Level Control
    (Wiley, 2002-03)
    In its White Paper on the Governance of the European Union the European Commission has adopted a narrow concept of governance which focuses almost exclusively on public institutions exercising legislative and executive power (in other words institutions of government). The article suggests that a theory of multi-level control in the EU would attend to greater variety both in the available governance institutions and the techniques of control. The deployment of an analysis grounded in theories of control suggests that the European Commission is substantially holding to a long-held preference for instruments of government premised on the exercise of hierarchical power. This reform path sits uneasily with revived concerns to render the governance of the EU more democratic. Equally it inhibits the generation of more efficient governance arrangements which place greater dependence on communities, competition, and design as alternative bases of control to hierarchy. Control theory suggests that the assertion of different reform agendas and institutional structures by other actors can check the more wayward(and arguably illegitimate) tendencies within the Commission plan, whilst drawing in alternative bases of control which, when combined, may yield technically superior governance solutions.
    Scopus© Citations 47  584
  • Publication
    Services of General Interest in EC Law: Matching Values to Regulatory Technique in the Public and Privatised Sectors
    (Wiley, 2000-12)
    All the European Union Member States have long traditions of state activity in providing key services (such as the utilities, health and education) to their citizens and underpinning both such direct provision and provision of services by non-state actors with certain administrative or legal guarantees. In European Community doctrines they are referred to as ‘services of general interest’ within which is a narrower class of ‘services of general economic interest’. The diverse national public service traditions have been challenged both by the requirements of the single market and by other pressures such as fiscal crisis and broader public sector reform. This article examines the means by which services to which special principles should be applied can be identified and focuses on the range of sometimes contradictory values denoted by the term ‘services of general interest’, examining the range of regime types (based on hierarchical, competition-based and community forms) by which those values might be pursued. The concluding section suggests that the matching of values to techniques should not be made according to the importance of the values to be pursued, but rather by reference to which techniques are likely to be effective given the configuration of interests and capacities and existing culture within the target domain.
    Scopus© Citations 23  485
  • Publication
    The Democratic Challenges of Effective Private Regulation and Enforcement
    (Hart Publishing, 2019-10-31)
    Effective private regulation and enforcement presents a challenge to a view of democratic states and governance that the state, by virtue of electoral politics, should have a monopoly over coercive power. However, there is nothing new in the observation of the importance of private power to regulate others. Private regulation clearly belongs in the catalogue of significant regulatory power and in this chapter I suggest how practices of private regulation and enforcement might be accommodated within democratic theory and practice. I suggest in this chapter that if we take the idea of decentring seriously and recognise the emergence of a decentralised nodal governance over many economic and social activities, then we can see the role of governance nodes away from central government not simply as monitoring or scrutinising, but also as originating and performing in respect of key governance activities. This observation transforms the democratic challenge. Instead of trying to pull decentred power back towards traditional representative democracy, we may instead ask how these decentralised governance nodes themselves seek to manage and develop their democratic legitimacy. The management of legitimacy occurs through the setting of norms and adoption of practices relating to how those exercising power in governance nodes undertake their actions. These norms and practices are concerned with a range of issues: who participates in setting agendas?; how decisions on setting norms are made?; how monitoring and enforcement is executed in a manner that is referrable to the decisions of the demos associated with the governance regime?; and how such regimes review, revise and reflect on their activities, to understand their own sources both of legitimacy and effectiveness, but also their relationship of interdependence to others within a decentred governance model? The last main section of the chapter looks at five stages in the regulatory policy cycle to evaluate the evidence of the emergence of novel ways of democratising both public and private nodes of regulatory governance.
      237
  • Publication
    Regulation and Governance Reforms for Ireland and the European Union
    (University College Dublin. School of Law, 2001)
    Governance has become one of the most fashionable words to link to reform both of private and public sector institutions. With corporate governance both gove rnment and professional bodies such as the Irish Association of Investment Managers have sought to raise the standards of conduct of the directors of major companies. Major reforms both of the public service generally and of regulatory bodies in particula r are designed to enhance governance arrangements for the public sector. Responding to concerns about the legitimacy of European Union institutions the European Commission has published a White Paper on European Governance which proposes major reform of EU governance
      152