European Union

Que Anh Dang 

• How might we understand the changing governance of scientific research at national, regional and supranational levels in Europe?
• What are the prevailing and conflicting political, economic, cultural and ideational discourses, discursive contexts and rationales for constituting and governing intermediary research executive agencies? How do they operate?
• What are the consequences/outcomes caused by the tensions and compromises between these supposedly independent agencies and the national governments or regional institutions?
• What are the implications for research policies and academic practices at higher education institutions?

 

Panel chair Sarah Glück

These are some overarching questions addressed by the panel ‘Research Executive Agencies – between Independent Organisations and Governments’ organised by Lisa Kressin and Sarah Glück in the Section on the Politics of Higher Education, Research and Innovation at the European Consortium for Political Research ECPR General Conference 6-9 September in Oslo. The papers in this panel examine the historical trajectories, discursive contexts in the institutionalisation processes and the actual workings of the research funding executive agencies in Germany, Austria, the Nordic region and the European Union.

 

National Contexts: Agencification and Autonomy

In some German-speaking national contexts, there is a practice of agencification in which the principals (ministries) play the role of defining political strategies, framework and rules, and let the agents (the executive agencies) be in charge of implementation processes and manage public research funds on the government’s behalf. Rupert Pichler and Sascha Ruhland, in their paper titled ‘The role of research funding agencies in policy discretion and coordination in Austria’, examined multiple funding agencies and focus on the case of the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) – a merger of several fragmented funding organisations. FFG has a legal form of a limited company and has the mandates to serve many ministries, provincial governments and the EU. They argued that the very nature of multi-principal and multi-sector agency has put FFG in a position to propose strategic plans that are to be approved by the various ministries. Sometimes the inter-ministerial negotiations are outsourced to FFG. In essence, the principals are coordinated by the agent rather than being in the driver’s seat, thus blurring the boundaries between principal’s and agent’s tasks and roles. They concluded that although principals and agents are deeply entangled, there are always ‘lasting tensions’ oscillating between agency capture and government interference. Therefore, the principal-agent relationship is constantly adjusted.

 

Regional Contexts: Changing Governance Architecture

Que Anh Dang presented the paper ‘Nordic Umbrella Organisations for Higher Education and Research: Region-building and Market-making’ and highlighted the case of the Nordic research funding executive agency – NordForsk. Although NordForsk was established in 2005 in the aftermath of the Lisbon Strategy with a competitiveness boosting agenda, it was rooted in the long-standing Nordic regional cooperation in many sectors. NordForsk is ‘old wine in a new bottle’ and it represents a continuation of previous regional initiatives and the Nordic informal and pragmatic approach to cooperation. However, NordForsk has constituted new spaces for policy making which alter regional governance pattern. She argued that, in the Nordic case, these new spaces are not located above the state, rather, regional frontiers are created within the national policy-making apparatus including its political institutions. NordForsk is not about the emergence, consolidation or sustainability of the supranational authority but about the rescaling of governance and pubic authority to regional spaces – a politics of regionalism that is simultaneously regional and national. The legitimacy of intermediary agencies, like NordForsk, is secured through various forms of accountability. Such accountability is ensured by ‘accountability communities’- a complex ensemble of public and private organisations endowed with capacities to perform legislative, monitoring and compliance activities. Que Anh concluded that these communities also possess particular understandings of accountability (soft law of standards and codes) and provide the basis for new ways of region-building and market-making.

 

Que Anh Dang. Photo credits: Thomas König

Inga Ulnicane presented her research on Grand societal challenges asking if challenge-orientation represents a new policy paradigm in science, technology and innovation policy. She compared recent challenge-orientation with earlier mission-oriented science, technology and innovation policies and discussed a number of policy initiatives to address societal challenges launched by NordForsk, European Union and Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova.

 

Thomas König, one of the panellists, launched his new book ‘The European Research Council’ (ERC) during the conference. This book is a comprehensive research into the creation and development of the ERC. With an ethnographic method, Thomas gives a detailed account of how a group of strong-minded European scientists succeeded in establishing the ERC by pushing for a single goal: more money for scientific research with fewer strings attached. The book also critically analyses the achievements and challenges faced by the ERC and engages with a broader question concerning the relationships between politics, science and public money.

 

Some Reflections

Presentations in this panel prompted some reflections and ideas for further empirical studies:

-          The classical principal-agent theory is deficient in explaining the complex relationships between the research funding executive agencies and their founders and funders (be it national or regional bodies). We need new theories and novel ways of understanding the power relations between the principals (ministries, group of states, supranational union) and the agents (intermediary agencies);

-          Although the agents derive their authority from their expertise, they have to constantly negotiate and secure their legitimacy and autonomy in various ways and with a range of actors including the principals, academic communities, the society and the wider public (tax-payers);

-          Neoliberalism constitutes the hegemonic economic discourse within science and innovation which introduces a new mode of regulation premised on the belief that competition – in the name of ‘Excellence’– is the most efficient and a morally superior mechanism for allocating resources and opportunities. The workings of all these agencies are governed, albeit at varying degrees, by this economic discourse and its accompanied contractual relations;

-          The research funding executive agencies take on multiple identities depending on which actors they interact with. Despite their motto to uphold academic freedom and support investigator-driven research, they often act as translators and mediators between politics, science and administration.

In summary, the panel provides deep insights into concrete case studies and offers new ways of understanding intermediary agencies and the implications for research policies in the complex governance structures in Europe. We wish to exchange ideas and learn from more case studies in other national and regional contexts to broaden our scholarship.

 

Dr. Que Anh Dang is a researcher at the German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg. Her research interests include higher education and regionalism, the role of international organisations in policy making, higher education in the knowledge economy, and education diplomacy. She is a co-editor and an author of the book ‘Global Regionalisms and Higher Education’ (2016).

 

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will take place on Wednesday 22 November, 9:00-12:30 and 14:30-18:30 and Thursday 23 November, 9:00-12:30 in Brussels.

Organisations or interest groups who wish to apply for access to the European Parliament will find the relevant information below.

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I’ve talked before about how negotiation theory might throw some light on the Article 50 process, but it seems useful to return to the subject, given the continuing difficulties that the sides are encountering: might the literature offer some insights?

Today, it’s Zartman who springs to mind. He writes on the conflict management side of negotiation, which might appear to be a bit heavy-handed for this situation, but his analysis of the basic mechanics is one that I (and my students) offer find helpful in more mundane situations.

Zartman argues that negotiation is about the resolution of structural differences between negotiating parties and his big thing is about reducing differences: the more you can close the gap between parties, the more likely you are to find space for a mutually-acceptable agreement.

He suggests there are four ways that differences get reduced; two softer options, and two harder ones, with each pair being the opposite of each other.

The soft pair is about making options look more or less attractive. You might suggest that taking a particular option will produce benefits, or that taking another will come with costs.

The hard pair finds parties arguing that they either have to take an option, or it is impossible to take it, because their hands are tied in some way.

The soft pair is ubiquitous in politics and in Brexit: everyone’s telling us how option X will lead to sunlight uplands or the end of civilisation as we know it, so I don’t care to revisit all of these.

But what we’re seeing in recent weeks is more of the hard option, on both sides.

For the EU, there has always been some element of this, from the insistence that Article 50 is the only legal framework for departure negotiations, to the Commission explaining that its mandate doesn’t let it talk about transition before sufficient progress has been made on Phase I issues.

For the UK, the original hard position – Brexit has to mean leaving the EU – has faded over time, but now it creeps back into discussion.

This was most vividly seen in this week’s mixed messages on a no-deal scenario. First, Philip Hammond told the Select Committee that there was no money yet for such a situation, before his boss popped up in PMQs to say that there was money already committed.

What seems to have passed most media comment on the spat of the day by is that both of them were essentially working towards a position of making no-deal ever less of an option, through incapacity.

Money is obviously important here, but more important is how that money is used. In a no-deal scenario, there will be an immediate requirement for substantial increases in border controls for customs, much regulatory uncertainty and a wealth of other impacts (see this for an overview).

None of those gaps can be closed immediately: to take the most obvious example, if customs controls are needed, then land has to be secured, built upon, and staffed by people you’ve trained.

As of the moment, none of the necessary procurement activity for this to happen has begun, and even on the most ambitious timetable that would take 18 months to do, which is about now.

Thus while May might seem to be taking a more conciliatory line with her party’s hardliners, she actually looks to be providing cover to a push on working towards a deal, since if the UK is simply incapable of policing a non-deal, then that might encourage domestic opinion to accept the need for a deal.

But this incident also raises another perspective that ties back to Zartman’s model, namely May’s seeming unwillingness to reduce alternatives at all.

May remains a very elusive figure, refusing to tie herself down to any one option; or, more accurately, tying herself to many, simultaneously-inconsistent options.

As has been widely discussed, her apparent lack of a desired end-state makes it almost impossible to reach any kind of agreement in Article 50: you can’t negotiate with someone who doesn’t know what they want.

Perhaps the best way to understand this is to see May’s position as one where she’s running two sets of negotiation at the same time: one with the EU and one with her party.

While Article 50 points to a need for a strategic objective from the UK, party management points to a need to keep options open (or at least fudged) so that she isn’t removed from office or defeated in the Commons.

Seen in this light, May’s actions make more sense, as she tries to engineer faits accomplis in Article 50 while arguing for much more back home.

Whether this is a viable long-term strategy is doubtful, especially as we move towards the European Council’s decision next week on ‘sufficient progress’, where rhetoric is going to become a big factor once more. Adding that to an already-deeply-suspicious Tory party and it’s not too hard to imagine someone pushing the leadership challenge button more firmly.

And at that point you can expect a whole lot more examples of why contender X is good/bad or must/mustn’t lead the country at this critical juncture.

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The Committee of the Regions is the voice of regions and cities in the European Union. The members are regional and locally elected representatives from the 28 EU countries.

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On 11 October, SEDE will hold a public hearing on the militarisation in the Black Sea. The hearing is timely, as the regional security situation on the eastern flank has become very challenging for the EU and NATO. It will focus on the security situation following the Russian illegal annexation of Crimea and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Furthermore, the hearing will analyse the military strategic consequences of the conflicts and the possibilities to foster stability and cooperation.
Location : Paul-Henri Spaak 5B001
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On 11 October, SEDE will hold a public hearing on the militarisation in the Black Sea. The hearing is timely, as the regional security situation on the eastern flank has become very challenging for the EU and NATO. It will focus on the security situation following the Russian illegal annexation of Crimea and the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Furthermore, the hearing will analyse the military strategic consequences of the conflicts and the possibilities to foster stability and cooperation.
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EU Finance ministers meet on 10 October 2017 in Luxembourg to adopt conclusions on the financing aspects of climate change. They are discussing the preparation of the autumn G20 and IMF meetings and lessons learned from the 2017 European Semester.

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Last year I was fortunate enough to take part in a masterclass for early career researchers on EU regional policy organised by the Regional Studies Association, the EU Committee of the Regions and the European Commission. The masterclass was part of the annual European Week of Regions and Cities, which last year it took place against the backdrop of the recent UK referendum on EU membership. During the opening plenary EU Regional Policy Commissioner, Corina Crețu, highlighted her disappointment that regions which have seen significant investment from the EU’s regional policy, such as Cornwall, Wales and the North East, voted to leave the EU. This, Commissioner Crețu argues, highlighted the need to look at how well EU spending in these regions was communicated.

This year’s European Week of Regions and Cities is happening at the moment. While I’m not fortunate enough to be there in person this year, I am trying to follow what’s going on. Again in this year’s opening plenary, Commissioner Crețu highlighted the need to improve how EU regional policy is communicated to citizens. This focus on the communication of regional policy has become increasingly important, not least because of the Brexit vote, but also because regional policy spending accounts for a third of the EU’s entire budget. The assumption is if citizens are aware of what EU regional policy does in their local area they’ll have a greater understanding of how the EU supports them and their local areas, and consequently have a more positive attitude towards the EU.

So, what effect will raising awareness of EU regional policy have? Given Commissioner Crețu’s disappointment at the result in certain UK regions, let’s have a look at EU regional policy awareness in those regions and the result of the UK’s referendum on EU membership.

The data here is aggregated here at the NUTS1 level. Data on the EU referendum result comes from the UK Electoral Commission, while awareness of EU regional policy is taken from Flash Eurobarometer 423 on EU citizen awareness and perceptions of EU regional policy. This was conducted one year prior to the referendum. The main question we’re interested in is: “Europe provides financial support to regions and cities. Have you heard about any EU co-financed projects to improve the area where you live?” The aggregate data I’ve used can be downloaded here.

Generally speaking, UK regions with higher levels of regional policy awareness appear to have lower levels of support for “Remain” in the referendum. Crucially, in the UK’s case at least, higher levels of regional policy awareness, didn’t translate into higher levels of EU support at the ballot box.

This comes with some rather large caveats, of course. The UK may be a unique case here. NUTS1 regions are rather large and diverse, so this isn’t going to account for large differences of awareness and EU spending within these regions. And regional policy spending had very little, if anything at all, to do with the referendum result (that’s for another blog post!). While there is a negative correlation (r = -0.43), it isn’t significant at the 0.05 level (p = 0.165).

These caveats aside, the key message to take away here is that merely raising awareness of EU regional policy spending isn’t going to be enough. If the EU wants to increase support among citizens it is going to have to do more than just show it spends money in a given area. There needs to be more of a focus on how that communication will work and how it will engage with citizens. Part of this will also come down to how regional policy is designed and how EU funding is invested in local areas. Does it meet local economic need and does it address the priorities citizens see as important?

There are grounds for optimism. Initiatives to improve the communication of EU regional spending are out there. During last year’s masterclass I witnessed Fireflies, a Lithuanian project led by local organisations aiming to increase transparency in EU regional policy by showing how EU funding is spent, win the 2016 RegioStars award. However the lessons from projects like this need to receive greater recognition by EU policy makers and be applied more widely beyond the confined of a single project.

So yes, communicating regional policy is important, but much more thought need to be put into how this will work rather than simply telling citizens how much EU cash is spent locally.

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In ten days (October 19-20) Czech voters will go to the polling stations. After four years, they will decide once more about the future of Czechia – as the republic in the middle of the Europe is (unsuccessfully) trying to rebrand its name. And once more, these elections are portrayed as “important” or “path-breaking”, not only in the Czech press but also by more than few politicians.

I am saying “once more”, because it is not the first time. Quite the contrary: over the last seven years Czech politics have changed a lot. From stability to instability. From being predictable to being chaotic. And from being quite moderate to being populist. How could this happen?

Once upon a time, there was a small country called Czech Republic in the heart of Europe. Until around 2010, it had been a remarkably stable country since its establishment in January 1993, when a marriage of over eighty years broke up between the Czechs and the Slovaks. While in neighbouring countries like Poland or Slovakia new relevant parties emerged and died often during one term, the Czech party spectrum was pretty boring. With five or at worst six relevant parties, and standard governmental changes from centre left to centre right. Even newcomers – such as for example the Czech Greens in 2006 – were traditional parties in the sense that they represented a set of coherent ideas and goals.

Then everything changed in the 2010 elections and since then, Czech politics have become a different story. Unfortunately for the country, with consequences beyond the purely domestic level.

Well, as in many similar cases, one has to turn to history to find answers to “why” this happened. Even if 2010 may be considered the turning point, the causes explaining the “electoral earthquake” had appeared slowly from the mid-1990s. At this time, the Czech transition – particularly in its economic dimension – appeared to be a successful and achieved process. Already in 1996 electoral campaign, Václav Klaus, one of the symbols of Czech modern politics and at that time acting prime minister, claimed so under his slogan “We proved that we can manage”. However, voters did not seem to be convinced and massively supported the opposition in this election. The very tight result of these elections opened a path to a second coalition government led by Václav Klaus. It was a minority government, a weak one, and had to resign already after being in office for not more than one and a half years. First early elections then resulted in a similar draw as in 1996, but this time the government was formed by the Social Democrats, and Miloš Zeman, another key figure of Czech politics, became prime minister. That would not have been tragic, but his minority cabinet was backed by Klaus’ “Civic Democrats”, its main rival and enemy, in a so called “opposition agreement”. This pseudo-coalition and pseudo-opposition – for which Klaus and Zeman are not to be blamed along, since it was partly a result of the inability of other political parties to find a solution – deeply wounded the trust of Czech voters in traditional parties. These wounds never disappeared.

The second major mistake – decentralisation – can be tracked back to the 1990s as well. The idea to create regions and endow them with some competences – education, regional development, health care – is not bad per se and was supported at the time by the majority of political parties. However, big problems occurred when these regions obtained the power to manage the money from the EU structural funds. Particularly from 2006 on, almost every single Czech region – and its political representatives – faced to a huge corruption scandal. These were usually directly or indirectly linked to the structural funds projects, often connected with regional politicians either from the Civic Democratic Party or from the Social Democrats. The regionalisation of EU funds led to networks of strong regional leaders and their business allies, which were for the parties´ headquarters almost impossible to control. The existence of these people – for whom the term “godfathers” is widely used – and their scandals was another nail in the coffin of traditional Czech parties.

Although there were also international and contextual causes for change in Czech politics – as for example the tragicomic Czech EU Presidency of 2009 or the outbreak of the financial crisis – the main dynamics of the 2010 earthquake are to be found inside the system and explained by mistakes committed by its leading politicians. As a result, the 2010 elections introduced the first populists into the Czech parliament. A party called “Public Affairs” successfully campaigned under the motto “We will wipe out the political dinosaurs” and became a part of the new government. Even though “Public Affairs” performed very badly and broke up after 3 years, their initial success opened a Pandora box of populism as affective tool. In 2013, in the second Czech early elections, it was effectively used by other new parties –Andrej Babiš’s non-ideological “Action of Dissatisfied Citizens” (known as ANO) and the right-wing populist “Dawn of Direct Democracy”. The first movement, led (and owned, one could add) by one of the country’s richest businessmen, used the slogan “We are not like politicians, we are hard workers”, whereas Dawn promoted direct democracy as a universal medicine for everything wrong in the Czech Republic.

Particularly the former appeal was successful, as ANO – following the footsteps of “Public Affairs” (but not repeating the same mistakes) – has been participating in the new government and became the strongest political force in the country. The major question in 2017 is not who will win, but by how much ANO will win and how many partners (if at all) it will need to get a majority in the lower house. According to the most recent polls, traditional parties as the Social Democrats or the Civic Democrats are tottering around 10-12% of votes. At the moment, they fight with other small parties and possible newcomers like the “Pirates” – an emerging star of the Czech party landscape – rather than with ANO.

The Czech electoral system is a proportional one with a 5% threshold for obtaining seats in the House of Deputies. However, as the seats are distributed in 13 plus Prague regions, it has also some majoritarian elements. These are even strengthened by using the d´Hondt formula for calculating mandates. Hence, a party with approximately 30% of the votes can have around 40% or even more of the seats in the House of Deputies depending also on how many votes will fall below the 5% threshold and will thus be distributed among the successful parties.

Apart from the ANO victory the overall result of the elections is hardly to predict. The electoral campaign is not that much intensive and lack strong themes and issues. Traditional parties try to picture Mr. Babiš as dangerous oligarch and possible wannabe dictator, but fail to offer any positive and interesting agenda on their own. There other problem is the lack of charismatic leaders, an obvious must-have in current politics.

Therefore, what is to be expected as main outcome of the 2017 Czech elections is further instability in Czech politics as well as the strengthening of populism within it.

The post The Czechs are going to vote. And strengthen the populists further. appeared first on Ideas on Europe.

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EU Finance Ministers of the eurozone meet on 9 October 2017 in Luxembourg to discuss possible future roles and tasks of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) in the context of the ongoing broader debate on the future of the Economic and Monetary Union. Discussions on financing labour tax cuts and the post-programme surveillance mission to Portugal are also on the agenda.

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EU Ministers of Agriculture and Fisheries meet on 9 and 10 October 2017 in Luxembourg to decide on the 2018 fishing opportunities for the Baltic Sea and discuss developments in the agricultural markets, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, and the follow-up to the fipronil case.

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Committee meetings, Brussels

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Spain's Constitutional Court has banned a session of the Catalonian parliament slated for this coming Monday in which the region's independence was to be declared. As a way out of the Catalonia crisis some commentators propose a complete restructuring of the Spanish state. Others believe the country would be more democratic after the secession of Catalonia.