We consider whether transnational networks that softly discipline Member States (such as the OMC or regulatory networks that oversee national discretion in implementing broad EU frameworks) mark a significant turn in European integration or merely a transitional step towards centralization (agencification) and formalization (subjecting to law). We suggest this requires a closer reading of the institutional changes necessary to bring about centralization/formalization, and ask particularly whether change might be partially attributable to the very institutional‐agents operating inside Europe's networked modes of governance. Supplementing functional‐political explanations, we propose an endogenous model of institutional change that incorporates the independent role transnational networks play in shaping their own institutionalization, which may make this mode of governance more resilient and even self‐reinforcing. We test the plausibility of this model with a case‐study detailing the institutional entrepreneurship of transnational networks in the telecoms sector.
This article appraises the scope and legal obligations of the UK Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012. The law, by imposing on public authorities an obligation to consider wider social, economic and environmental benefits before they enter into major public service contracts, in principle improves service outcomes for communities, and it also facilitates better access for third sector organisations to public contracting opportunities. But evidence of the legislation's impact has been mixed. It is, at this stage, promising in its ambition but with little prescriptive legal force in practice. The article suggests that community and third sector organisations should promote an experimentalist governance framework that imposes non-legal accountability on commissioning authorities for social value, by linking them into an iterative peer-review process.
This article considers various, established and emerging, alternative business forms that differ categorically from the traditional corporation in terms of their governance, objectives, and/or ownership structures, including mission‐led businesses, social enterprises, cooperatives, and co‐owned firms. Notwithstanding their considerable diversity, the underpinning pattern of these alternatives points towards a stakeholder model of corporate governance that commits the firm to generating value by maximizing the positive impact on its (internal and external) stakeholders while limiting negative impacts, with trade‐offs carefully balanced against each other. Through these commitments, the firm internalizes a process of democratic contestation: a procedure to mediate the different interests of these market actors is incorporated directly into the structure of the firm, through procedural mechanisms embedded within its internal constitution.
This chapter considers the evolving institutional responses to the challenge of regulating telecoms in the EU, taking in the Commission’s push for creating an EU agency versus the resilience of the transnationally networked model, which is usually attributed to the Member States’ sovereignty reflex. Were recent negotiations over the reform of the Regulatory Framework for telecoms, concluded in 2009, simply a turf-war in which the Commission sought to extend the EU’s role against resistance from the Member States, or did the national telecoms regulators and their existing transnational network influence the eventual compromise to retain the soft law, networked model, albeit with some hardening? Characterised as a classic integration struggle, the Member States’ intergovernmental instincts were pitched against the Commission’s supranational instincts and its preference for instruments of control premised on the centralised exercise of hierarchical power. But this chapter paints a more fine-grained picture of the negotiation’s dynamics and especially the influence of the national regulatory authorities (NRAs) and their existing transnational network; a community of expertise that stood to have its role either strengthened or diminished in the revised institutional architecture. In doing so, the chapter moves beyond orthodox (intergovernmental and neofunctionalist) accounts of these dynamics to take an institutionalist approach that is better suited to analysing the EU as a mature system of governance.
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