Governance and Participation

The European Commission has traditionally sought to involve societal stakeholders as experts in its policy making. These efforts are due to the Commission’s exclusive right to initiate European policies, its comparatively narrow base of resources, and the necessity to elicit consensual political solutions (see Christiansen et al. 2003

: 2–3; Kohler-Koch 1996 ). The inclusion of citizens’ associations in EU policy making was further stimulated by the extension of EU competences in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty. This drew new societal actors to the EU political system and attracted the attention of EU integration researchers. Hence, the European Commission and its informal relations with different types of societal stakeholders became a natural object of research on European governance. These stakeholders range – depending on the changing policy competences of the Commission – from business interests to the social partners, welfare organizations or consumer, women and environmental groups.

The ‘participatory governance’ approach, which can be associated with this type of research, does not invoke participatory democracy by demanding authentic governance ‘by the people’. It rather draws on an output-oriented tradition of investigating citizens’ involvement in the EU in terms of its contribution to effective political problem-solving (see Heinelt and Smith 2003 ; Grote and Gbikpi 2002 ; Heinelt et al. 2002

; Van den Hove 2000 ). ‘Participatory governance’ reconciles system effectiveness and citizens’ participation by invoking Charles Lindblom’s ‘intelligence of democracy’ thesis (Lindblom 1965 ). Advocates of this approach argue that participation supports system effectiveness because “it can help to overcome problems of implementation by considering motives and by fostering the willingness of policy addressees to comply as well as through the mobilization of the knowledge of those affected” (Gbikpi and Grote 2002 : 23). From this functional point of view, civil society participation is a necessary condition of system effectiveness and the democratic legitimacy of a governance system is being gauged in terms of its output (Heinelt 1998 ).

Drawing on this perception, Phillippe Schmitter suggests that the representatives of ‘collectivities’ that will be affected by a policy participate in the process of policy preparation and formulation. He introduces the notion of ‘holder’ to conceptualize citizens’ participation in EU governance: Holders are those persons or organizations that possess some quality or resource that entitles them to participate. The appropriate criterion for participation is chosen according to the substance of the problem to be solved (Schmitter 2002 : 62–63). This conception defines participation in functional terms which means that citizens’ right to participate depends on the resources they introduce in the political process. Proponents of this conception aim at finding out “under what circumstances participatory governance leads to sustainable and innovative outcomes” (Heinelt et al. 2002 : 3).

The edited volume of Thomas Christiansen and Simona Piattoni (Christiansen and Piattoni 2003 ) is another, if less accentuated example of this type of research. Contributions in this volume focus on the European Commission and its informal relations with citizens’ groups in different policy fields such as environment, biotechnology, single market regulation, the EMU, agriculture or nuclear policy. The aim is to give us a “broader picture of the Commission’s relations with interest groups, the role of networks in the EU policy process and the implications these features have had for European governance” (Christiansen et al. 2003

: 2). Most of the contributions in this volume are interested in the implications of informal governance arrangements for efficiency and effectiveness. They thus focus on the EU Commission’s information requirement and conceptualize interest groups as experts providing a specific kind of knowledge to the EU Commission.

The editors argue that the involvement of interest groups and NGOs “aided the Commission in gauging the likely reception of future EU policies ‘on the ground’ – an important knowledge in a system of decentralized implementation where much of the success of EU policies would depend on voluntary acceptance and compliance rather than enforcement” (Christiansen et al. 2003 : 2). This statement reflects Lindblom’s intelligence of democracy argument as presented by the proponents of participatory democracy. Aberrations to informal governance and interest group participation such as clientelism and nepotism generating corruption and fraud are first and foremost analyzed in functional terms as obstacles to effective governance (see Warner 2003 ), although legitimacy problems related to informal governance are also addressed in a discrete contribution (see Warleigh 2003 ).⁸

The Third Sector Approach
Before I turn to interest group research as another output-oriented approach to citizens’ involvement in EU governance, I will briefly touch upon the third sector and non-profit organization terminology which is also invoked in the current debate on civil society and EU governance (see Zimmer and Freise 2006

; Eisele 2005 ). The concept is closely associated with the modern welfare state which has been delegating welfare tasks to the private sector. It gained momentum in the mid-1980s when voluntary non-profit organizations, in view of governmental cutbacks in the spending of Western welfare states, stepped in to deliver social services formerly provided by the government (Zimmer and Freise 2006 : 6–7). Advocates of the third sector approach rely on a distinctly functional conception of societal involvement. They turn our attention to the service function of non-profit organizations and their contribution to the effective implementation of welfare policies, while ‘participatory governance’ investigates the agenda setting and policy formulation phase of the policy cycle. One could hence argue that third sector research investigates the flipside of the coin participatory governance is concerned with. However, since policy implementation is not the main playing field of the EU, third sector research has rarely focused on the EU (see Kendall and Anheier 1999 discussing EU policy initiatives such as the Structural Funds and their implications for third sector research.)

2.1 Governance and Participation