Documents Armstrong, Kenneth A. 2 results

"As the successor to the decade-long Lisbon agenda, Europe 2020 is the European Union's 10-year strategy for ‘smart', ‘sustainable' and ‘inclusive' growth. This article analyses the ‘governance architecture' of this new agenda, and, more particularly, its social dimension. Insofar as Europe 2020 has a social dimension it is located within a suite of thematic ‘flagship initiatives', as well as within a policy coordination framework that, while building upon the Lisbon agenda's governance architecture, now forms part of the European Semester framework. Whereas the flagship initiatives continue a long tradition of the deployment of non-legislative instruments and EU funds towards the EU's social goals, the role to be played by the ‘open method of coordination' as a ‘new' post-Lisbon form of EU social governance remains unclear. Indeed, the risk is that political energy will be concentrated on policy coordination as a means of strengthening EU economic governance rather than as a vehicle for articulating a progressive social policy vision. "

"The pursuit of social solidarity and social justice has typically occurred within the boundaries of nation states. Yet in 2000, EU Member States committed themselves to make a decisive impact on the eradication of poverty and agreed to coordinate their activities within the framework of a novel governance process: the Open Method of Coordination (OMC). This book analyzes the emerging governance of social inclusion in the EU and the use of the OMC as a mechanism of Europeanization of domestic social policy.
Armstrong's exploration of EU interventions to combat poverty and social exclusion addresses the changing constitutional, policy and governance context in which these interventions have occurred. It traces the impact of debates surrounding the Lisbon Treaty and the Lisbon Strategy in framing the possibilities and limits of EU action. Drawing on primary documentary material, on interviews with key actors and on a wide range of academic literature, this study offers a socio-legal account of the successes and failures of a decade of EU policy coordination. Utilizing the conceptual and theoretical tools associated with institutionalist analysis and experimental governance to develop the discussion of Europeanization, the book will be of value not only to scholars working on EU policy making but also to those interested in changing patterns of public authority in the social sphere more generally."