Suchergebnisse

How can we approach the Commission's role as co-manager of policy implementation? Why should we expect the Commission to be pulled into domestic policy execution and to accumulate something like an implementation management capacity? How should we conceptualise the Commission's linkage with post-decision management issues? Finally, how does the Commission's involvement in the application of EU policies, if any, significantly change everything? Such questions are answered in this study, which is concerned with what may be called the implementation management capacity of the European Commission. Simply put, this is the role the Commission plays in the implementation of large-scale European spending programmes. While it is true that the Commission's predominant prerogatives are to draft legislation and facilitate bargaining, it also has a role in post-decision policy management. This role is of increasing importance for the emerging governance of the European Union. Readership: social scientists, journalists and all those interested in the role of the European Commission in shaping EU policies

This article analyses the 'partnership principle'—which is of particular importance for multilevel governance interpretations of European integration—as it evolved in EU regional policy-making. After sketching the crucial analytical lines of the current debate on 'partnership' on the example of the implementation of the EU structural policy in Germany, I examine how it functions. A closer look at two important sub-fields of 'partnership'—'societal participation' and 'policy evaluation'—reveals that theoretical expectations regarding its transforming potential, in terms of pitting supranational and subnational actors against central state authority and thereby cir-cumventing the latter, have not materialised. On the contrary, recently rising resentment and out and out conflict between the European Commission and regional authorities so far point to theoretically unexpected limitations of 'partnership', calling into question whether it is an appro-priate and sustainable inter-administrative co-ordination device—at least when viewed from the perspective of the multilevel governance thesis. In the light of the reported insights into the prac-tice of 'partnership', this 'new mode of EU governance' thus needs to be reassessed.