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Colin Shaw, Brigid Laffan
In EU parlance, ‘Information Society’ designates policy areas covered by both Community and exclusively national competence. Consequently, the field is characterised by strong regulatory and weak voluntary governance. Taking the national experience of telecommunications legislation and regulation (as the ‘backbone of Information Society policy), an area of strong Community regulatory competence, and the eEurope agenda, an area dominated by weak voluntary action and the open method of coordination (OMC), this working paper will compare case studies from France and Ireland. After an overview of Community-level action in both areas of hard regulation and soft coordination, we will show how the implications of regulation have knock-on effects on coordination attempts and that far from achieving complementary goals with asymmetrical means, hard coordination can sometimes undermine attempts at overall coordination.
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Colin Shaw, Brigid Laffan
This paper examines how new modes of governance measure up to other governing modes. Faced with complex policy challenges, how does non-binding coordination compare to binding coordination. Have OMC-type processes been successful where they have been applied and do they represent an attractive alternative to policy makers? These questions will be analysed with respect to two policy fields; Information Society (IS) and Research (R&D). Central to the Community’s Lisbon agenda, the policies present overlapping and complementary objectives. While the former promotes the diffusion of knowledge and existing technologies, the latter contributes to knowledge creation and technological innovation. Taken together, each policy domain displays revealing ‘governance asymmetries’ as regards their objectives and their means to achieve them. These asymmetries illustrate the relative success of binding, non-binding and financial instruments in achieving policy goals.
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