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Imelda Maher
Law and the Open Method of Coordination: Towards a New Flexibility in European Policy-Making?
The Lisbon process links a specific form of governance – the open method – to a particular goal. The codification of policy coordination in the economic sphere made this method available to other sectors. Its characteristics – benchmarking, national action plans and peer review – are constant, but there is considerable variation across policy sectors, as the method exists within the realm of soft law. At the same time, soft law is on a continuum with hard law, and since the Lisbon process moves into its second phase with an emphasis on national implementation, the difficulty of drawing a firm distinction between soft and hard law will become more apparent. This can already be seen in relation to economic policy coordination with ECOFIN refusing to trigger more precise obligations for recalcitrant states and the Commission responding by commencing judicial review before the European Court.
Zeitschrift für Staats- und Europawissenschaften, Walter de Gruyter
Print ISSN: 1610-7780
Volume: 2, 06/2004
Pages: 248 - 262