Conclusion and outlook

Abstract

With regard to effectiveness, the precision of information was often not given. The objectives were intentionally broad in order to reach a political consensus. The interchangeable use of the terms “social exclusion”, “inclusion” and “social cohesion” reflects the lack of agreement among member states about the reasons of poverty and kinds of remedies (Mabbett 2005; Stanton 2003). It is this lack of precision which has proven helpful to policy-makers, as it allows them to associate the notions of exclusion and inclusion to different visions of society and respective policy traditions (Silver 1994). The consequence was that the operationalisation of objectives became arbitrary and the evaluation of policy performance quasi impossible. Governments took advantage of the vague nature of the common objectives in order to draft governmental reports which are most of the times quite arbitrary enumerations of a quasi endless list of policies, devoid of profound analysis and strategic planning. Member states refused to set targets. Instead, the way of benchmarking intended for the OMC inclusion encouraged “participants to manipulate the evidence to what is seen to be required” (Arrowsmith et al. 2004: 321). The Laeken indicators lack comparability and contextualisation (Kröger 2005a). Without the latter, however, the information provided by the indicators cannot support supranational learning processes and is insufficient for evaluating and designing anti-poverty policy (Szulc 2004). With the peer reviews, information lacked precision as well, so that participants often did not understand the policy at stake or did not see any added value in the peer review. More generally, it remained unclear exactly what should be learned from one another.