In the Shadow of Hierarchy: Governance as a Tool of Government

Abstract

Any understanding of the extent to which the emergence of new forms of governance has taken place, and of the significance of these developments for the balance of power in the EU policy process, requires some understanding of what the old methods were, the relative roles of the actors involved, and the context in which current practices developed. In short, it requires the understanding of how policy was developed under the Community method. Drawing on the example of EU social policy, it is argued that the Commission has always operated in ‘the shadow of hierarchy’ (Scharpf 1994), with member states able to limit the available capacity of formal competences.¹ Forced to consult when it was unable to legislate, or to utilise soft law when binding legislation was precluded, the Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities (DG EMPL), in common with other ‘Cinderella’ directorates such as DG Environment, developed an extensive armoury of ‘weapons of the weak’. This ‘consultation as a surrogate for action’ model has over time become ‘civil dialogue’, before being mainstreamed throughout the Commission and codified in the Treaty of Lisbon.

The results of institutional change cannot be evaluated with reference to discrete, isolated decisions, but must be assessed in terms of sequences of interdependent decisions taken by a variety of actors over time. This assumption of continuing relationships introduces a temporal dimension that is absent in one time choice situations usually considered in policy analysis.

(Majone 1989: 98)