Suchergebnisse

The paper examines the implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) in the European Union via National Action Plans (NAPs). We argue that some of the procedural and substantive shortcomings currently observed in the implementation process could effectively be addressed through the Open Method of Coordination – a governance instrument that the EU has already successfully used in other policy domains such as employment, social protection and education. Section two sketches out the polycentric global governance approach envisaged by the UNGPs and discusses the institutional and policy background of their implementation in the European Union. Section three provides an assessment of EU Member State National Action Plans on business and human rights, as benchmarked against international NAP guidance. Section four relates experiences with the existing NAP process to the policy background and rationale of the Open Method of Coordination and discusses the conditions for employing the OMC in the business and human rights domain. Against this background, section five make some more concrete proposals for developing an Open Method of Coordination on Business and Human Rights.

In the voluminous literature on the European Union's open method of coordination (OMC), no one has hitherto analysed on the basis of scholarly examination the question of what contributes to the learning processes in the OMC committees. On the basis of a questionnaire sent to all participants, this article demonstrates that valuable lessons can be learned about policy learning, in practice and theoretically, by analysing the cooperation in the OMC committees. Using the Advocacy Coalition Framework as the starting point of analysis, 15 hypotheses on policy learning are tested. Among other things, it is concluded that in order to maximize policy learning in international committees, empirical data should be made available to committees and provided by sources close to the participants (i.e. the Commission). In addition, the work in the committees should be made prestigious in order to attract well‐qualified and engaged participants, and a neutral presidency should be present in order to act as an authoritative persuader.

AbstractThis article seeks to understand how, within the open method of coordination peer review process, the European Union (EU) together with member states envision the processes of European integration within the employment policy field. Our theoretical framework draws light on alternatives, nuances, and tendencies of discursive potential for transcending the neoliberal image at the core of the European Social Policy literature. A content analysis of employment guidelines (1998–2015) and best practices in the peer review programs for employment policies (1999–2015) shows how the EU seeks to find credible roles for itself in employment policy and how in this process different ideas and even more practices prevail. We find clues for transcending the neoliberal picture, visions of a different Europe that is more in accord with the European values of liberal Social Europe and cosmopolitan Social Europe than is generally proposed in this context.

This article examines the reception of the education Open Method of Coordination (OMC) in the UK as an aspect of Europeanization of national administrations. It addresses relationships between political and administrative actors in the process of responding to the education OMC. We argue that despite progress with institutionalization of the education OMC at the EU level, there is limited institutionalization of the education OMC at the national level. Against the backdrop of UK skepticism about engaging with the EU integration project, the interesting finding is the administrative strategies employed for deflecting EU influence on the national education space.

Theoretisch

The construction of European education policy builds on a widely shared goal of transparency in qualifications, upheld by the popular narrative of mobile students endowed with scholarships from the EU Erasmus programme, which allow them to transfer credit points between universities and across national borders. EU education policy is increasingly inscribed in National Qualification Frameworks (NQF). Their European umbrella is coined the European Qualification Framework (EQF), which is linked to a discourse on or even shift to Learning Outcomes; functioning as a tool for the displacement of input to output categories in education systems with a view to make qualifications more transparent. This form of governance situates Learning Outcomes as a tool for policy reform that intentionally should affect all educational and administrative levels of European education. The article shows that the multitude of governance instruments used to promote a shift to Learning Outcomes are so varied that EU education policy has no apparent need of new instruments for this purpose. The fact that Learning Outcomes are linked to EU policy instruments of the Open Method of policy-Coordination and destined for several sectors of education, increases the likelihood that they will be translated into modified learning practices. Yet, there is a danger that governance of Learning Outcomes succumbs to a pitfall of declaratorily placing Learning Outcomes in the middle of learning practices in all subsectors of education, without sufficiently proving their real novelty and regulatory functions.