European and National Social Policy

This chapter portrays the development of social policy managed by the European Union, focuses on principles of steering in the EU’s social policy, and explores the distribution of power between national social political action in the member states and European social policy since 1957. The data show that the EU has been able to gain influence through regulatory social policies and soft governance instruments. As pertaining to social services, social expenditure, and redistributive concepts, however, the EU only plays a marginal role. The predominance of national social policy and the limited role of European social policy have been largely due to socio-economic diversity of the EU’s member state, heterogeneous welfare states, institutional obstacles of policymaking in the EU, and powerful national constraints.

The European Green Deal: What Prospects for Governing Climate Change With Policy Monitoring?

The European Green Deal (EGD) puts forward and engages with review mechanisms, such as the European Semester and policy monitoring, to ensure progress towards the long-term climate targets in a turbulent policy environment. Soft-governance mechanisms through policy monitoring have been long in the making, but their design, effects, and politics remain surprisingly under-researched. While some scholars have stressed their importance to climate governance, others have highlighted the difficulties in implementing robust policy monitoring systems, suggesting that they are neither self-implementing nor apolitical. This article advances knowledge on climate policy monitoring in the EU by proposing a new analytical framework to better understand past, present, and potential future policy monitoring efforts, especially in the context of the EGD. Drawing on Lasswell (1965), it unpacks the politics of policy monitoring by analysing <em>who </em>monitors,<em> what</em>,<em> why</em>,<em> when</em>,<em> and with what effect(s)</em>. The article discusses each element of the framework with a view to three key climate policy monitoring efforts in the EU which are particularly relevant for the EGD, namely those emerging from the Energy Efficiency Directive, the Renewable Energy Directive, and the Monitoring Mechanism Regulation (now included in the Energy Union Governance Regulation), as well as related processes for illustration. Doing so reveals that the policy monitoring regimes were set up differently in each case, that definitions of the subject of monitoring (i.e., public policies) either differ or remain elusive, and that the corresponding political and policy impact of monitoring varies. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of the findings for governing climate change by means of monitoring through the emerging EGD.

Contract-Boundary-Spanning Governance Initiatives in the International Defense Supply Chain of the F-35 Program

International cooperation in the American-led F-35 program inherently triggers national security concerns. Consequently, the multiple exports in the supply chain are subject to intricate licensing and export controls. Drawing on insights from governance and contract theory we introduce a theoretical lens that highlights some important trade compliance challenges in supply chain networks. In this chapter, contract-boundary-spanning governance mechanisms are defined as increasingly sophisticated hard or soft governance mechanisms in the private law sphere that can be deployed by any public or private stakeholder to govern international supply chains. We find contract-boundary-spanning governance initiatives by state and private stakeholders in the defense supply chain of the F-35 program. At the same time, we argue that while serious efforts have been made by various state actors and legislators to reduce the burden in trade compliance requirements in the F-35 program, the industry is still facing a considerable number of compliance challenges. We argue that more contract-boundary-spanning initiatives by the private parties in defense supply chain network are needed if these challenges are to be successfully overcome.

(Un)fit for 55! Ohne eine verschärfte Governance-Verordnung sind die Klimaziele 2030 nicht zu erreichen

The European Commission's “Fit for 55” package of July 2021 provides for a significant increase in renewable energy and energy efficiency targets in the European Union (EU). However, the EU’s competences in the energy sector are severely limited and subject to sovereignty. Already in 2018, the EU adopted a Governance Regulation that provides for a hardening of the otherwise only soft governance in the areas of renewable energies and energy efficiency due to the lack of European competences. It is intended to ensure that the Commission's recommendations for improving national energy and climate plans are implemented by the member states. An analysis of the quality of implementation of these recommendations now shows that this has a positive effect in areas with harder soft governance but still needs improvement. Increasing the targets of regulatory action cannot be successful without revising the Governance Regulation and hardening soft governance along with it. Otherwise, the EU is not fit for its 55 percent target in 2030.

IOs and Climate Change: Toward Global Eco-Social Policy

In the twenty-first century, climate change poses a major challenge to the work of IOs. This chapter contextualizes the historical shift from more compartmentalized understandings of climate change at the IO level, toward the current understanding of climate change as a pervasive threat to social policy across various issue areas. Fueled by ongoing discourse surrounding the Sustainable Development Agenda at the United Nations, a multiplicity of IOs are framing social policy issues in relation to climate change that may have traditionally been viewed as largely separate. The cross-cutting nature of the issue for IOs is highlighted, and as illustrated via an exploration of climate insurance as a social policy tool, climate change has led to compelling developments regarding the archetypal roles of IOs as actors of soft governance, raising questions for the future of IOs in the context of climate change and social policy engagement.

The Architecture of Arguments in Global Social Governance: Examining Populations and Discourses of International Organizations in Social Policies

As this chapter is the introduction to the book, it lays out in broad strokes the knowledge about the purposes, functions and characteristics of International Organizations (IOs) in general, and their involvement in social policy issues in particular. It then sets out some basic conceptualizations for studying IOs in global social governance before specifying the framework applied for exploring populations and discourses of IOs in global social policies. Complementing liberal and constructivist IR theories, the volume uses organizational ecology and soft governance approaches as heuristic frames for the analyses of different architectures of IO global social governance. ‘Populations’ are identified as the dominant as well as regional IOs active in a specific social policy issue; the concept of ‘discourse’ is understood as the strategic way in which individuals or collective actors frame ideas, and not as a structural understanding of how certain meanings influence behavior.

Nasjonale veiledere – «soft governance» og «nudging»?

This chapter examines how addiction and mental health policy can be designed to meet the objective of the new paradigm of community-based services applying soft governance tools while maintaining the balance between hierarchical governance and local autonomy. Nudging is a specific tool within the framework of soft governance. Furthermore, such instruments leave great latitude for local authorities. We explore how we can understand the development towards today’s dominant ideological perspectives, i.e. normalization, empowerment, towards recovery and “the patient first”, as a development process where soft governance is the overriding concept, increasingly providing room for development of more specific strategies characterized by nudging. Finally, we discuss some implications of using such instruments in practice.

International Organizations and the Architecture of Arguments in Global Social Governance

The concluding chapter resumes the arguments made in the introduction to this volume. It summarizes the empirical findings of the individual contributions and highlights prevailing cross-cutting issues and themes. It also depicts further and future avenues of research resulting from this volume. Overall, it becomes evident that International organizations (IOs) have been part of the architecture of arguments in global social governance for a long time. They have been populating diverse social fields in which they more often cooperate or coexist in issue-related or individual regional niches than contest each other. However, they often share a field with other actors, too. IOs have also proven strong in exercising soft governance as the broadcasters of new ideas. Thus, they have cognitive authority over their specific field. However, birth characteristics, such as membership rules or the design of decision-taking, as well as path-dependencies influence IO activities and discourses.

On Financial Nationalism and International Law: Sovereignty, Cooperation and Hard/Soft Governance in International Finance

The prevailing view among legal scholars over the last decade is that international financial collaboration is a resolutely cooperative venture that cannot be reduced to the interests or relative power of individual states. Moving along this line, the book under review shows that the protection of financial nationalism contributes to the creation of global systemic risks. In this review essay, I discuss the three overarching themes addressed in the book – namely, the logic of financial nationalism, the role of soft and hard law in the international governance of finance and the related problem of compliance. International financial law is still emerging as a discipline and the issues under discussion are at the heart of the ongoing debate about how to devise adequate international structures and international norms to govern markets and control systemic risks in finance. Proceeding from a critical approach to the international law of finance, I analyse the book’s focus on financial nationalism and the limits of its juxtaposition with the economic logic of externalities; the case for strengthened formalization; and, finally, the extent to which the theoretical framework proposed in the book is relevant for rethinking the logic and prospect of compliance in international finance.