Making Europe in their Image: Communities of expertise and the shaping of transnational governance

The project investigates recent negotiations over reform to the governance of telecoms in the EU to test an innovative endogenous account of EU institutional change. Given public sensitivity towards straight policy transfers to the EU, European states tend to hold onto these powers while seeking ways to coordinate their exercise when they raise complex, transnational issues. Increasingly they turn therefore to transnational networks made up of their own national policymaking experts, to which they submit their policy for scrutiny, as a means of systematising policy innovation and the exchange/emulation of best practice, but without any degree of harmonisation, but only a softer disciplining via expert peer review, monitoring and evaluation. The orthodox explanation for this 'New Governance' trend attributes it to the preferences of national governments, but the project reverses this to ask whether the very expert networks upon which this mode of governance depends might in fact account for its (trans)formation.

Taking expert networks' well-documented influence over policymaking for granted, the project considers whether it might extend to the design of the processes through which they exert that influence, in which case they are likely to ramp up certain characteristics in those processes that we associate with them: Organised around a common professional outlook, rather than national affiliation, they prefer to operate above 'parochial' national politics, in cooperative, technocratic and transnational settings. Their rationalist orientation resonates with the EU's legitimacy-by-results orientation, while their faith in experimentation, peer-review, and consensus-building resonates with its New Governance mode, though not its more top-down, harmonizing modes.

On this account, less formalised (but nonetheless transnational) communities of expertise that pre-exist their formal induction into New Governance's networks, lobby to be taken into this institutional fold, from where they are powerfully positioned to push for more of the same. Once established, a New Governance trajectory is therefore path-dependent; its entangled/symbiotic relationship with its expert networks making the two self-reinforcing. Better able to generate reasons to grow their power than others are at wresting it back, their specialist expertise emancipates them from their generalist political masters, who they easily out-manoeuvre to pull away from national political structures, while avoiding absorption into the EU's own structures, thus carving out a transnational governance space between the levels that lacks equivalent checks upon them.

The tortuous negotiations over the EU's new regulatory framework for telecoms (2006-2010) present an ideal laboratory for testing this theory. The project does not concern those aspects relating to substantive telecoms regulation, but only to reform to the institutional architecture and, more specifically: (1) the design of the new EU regulator, which boiled down to a choice between a network of national regulators or a centralised agency; and (2) the extent of the European Commission's powers over remedies designed by national regulators to solve competition problems on their telecoms markets, which boiled down to whether it should be able to veto and/or harmonise them. The significance of these issues is that the choices fall either side of the fault-line that the project investigates. Expressed in binary terms, they pitch traditional EU decision-making against New Governance; centralised implementation/harmonisation against decentralised processes and local discretion; and an EU agency against a networked model. We know something of the preferences and negotiating positions of the key actors and the outcomes of the negotiations, but need to research the influence of the network of national regulators in getting to this point.

The following non-academic beneficiaries have been identified: telecoms regulators in the UK (Ofcom), in other EU Member States, and beyond the EU; the UK Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and its counterpart ministries in other Member States; the European Commission and European Parliament; the UK parliament and parliaments of other Member States; telecoms operators, individually and associations (including the European Telecommunications Network Operators' Association and European Competitive Telecommunications Association); consumer groups (including the International Telecommunications Users Group); legal practitioners (representing any of those).

Beyond telecoms, the project bears potentially on any contemplated policy transfer to the EU, but relates most directly to the (trans)formation of circa thirty European regulatory networks (both officially constituted and those independent of the Commission) that are found in sectors as diverse as railways, food safety, energy, pharmaceuticals and postal services. It will be of interest to regulators, government, industry, consumers, legal practitioners, courts and tribunals working in (and on) all policy arenas that make extensive use of expert transnational networks and those where that use is beginning to intensify (including social services and local transportation).

These beneficiaries will benefit from greater understanding of a mode of governance that is being rolled out across ever more sectors in Europe (even if it is sometimes inadequately inculcated with public law values and the premium they place on ensuring public authority is publicly accountable). The trend towards hiving off policymaking from the political cut and thrust, alongside its transnational coordination, has seen the rise of a burgeoning transnational expert class that operates at the very periphery of traditional constitutional structures - far away from the national governmental-parliamentary complex - to leave lines of accountability back to the public stretched and incredibly tenuous. The findings of this project will allow beneficiaries to trace the (trans)formation of these structures with more clarity and thereby reveal ways of remaking/reinforcing some of these lines of accountability.

Pathways to impact have been built into the project. Key beneficiaries, especially the UK telecoms regulator Ofcom, have been involved in the project development and a letter of support received from them. Ofcom is a key player, both as regulator and policymaker, but also through its contacts with the telecoms industry and consumer groups in the sector. Other key beneficiaries - including government ministries, telecoms regulators in other Member States, the European Commission and Parliament - will be brought into the project at the interviews stage and kept informed of the progress of the research. A database of interested organisations and individuals will be built up during the project to facilitate the feeding back of research outcomes to these key beneficiaries. Recognising the particular relevance of the project to interviewees, all outputs will be forwarded to them and their institutions, using the interviews as the first stage in an ongoing relationship; engagement that will continue through follow-up letters, telephone calls and e-mails and ultimately lead to feeding back findings and outputs.

The knowledge of the research will be effectively disseminated through a jointly-authored working paper, two jointly authored articles (one in a peer-reviewed legal journal, one in a peer-reviewed sector-specific journal), two sole authored articles (one by PI and one by Co-I) in peer-reviewed legal journals. The research will be presented at (at least) four European conferences (two public/EU law conferences and two telecoms policy conferences). Both PI and Co-I have considerable experience