Contenu du sommaire : Varia

This article deals with the institutionalisation of a specific service in charge of evaluation within an organisation (DG DEV of the European Commission); which had been for a long time opposed to any idea of efficiency. It analyses the political and organisational stakes behind this service and its practices. Our hypothesis is that, due to a lots of resistance among the officials of DG DEVCO and of the EU delegations, these practices looks rather like a ritual of conformity to the norms of efficiency which had become dominant on the agenda of donors .

This paper focuses on the European REACH regulation on chemicals. We analyze the operations crafting regulatory categories in order to define technical objects and organizing the distribution of powers between public and private, national and European actors. This article suggests that the concept of “regulatory precaution” helps characterize a European mode of governing chemicals. The examples of the registration of nanomaterials and that of the autorisation of phtalates highlight the choice made by the European Commission in favour of a “case by case approach” that ends up multiplying regulatory categories, while postponing the introduction of legal constraints. These initiatives are not consensual: member states and the European Parliament produce more rigid regulatory categories, and thereby suggest an alternative mode of governing chemicals. Thus, regulatory precaution offers a lens through which one can identify the constitutional effects of the regulatory categories for European technical objects.

Since the end of the 1980's, the European network of cities called Eurocities draws on a range of expertise in order to establish itself as a network, to stand out as an interlocutor on urban issues in the eyes of European institutions and to take part in defining and implementing European public policies dedicated to cities. The initial construction of the network's expertise is mainly done by academic experts. But once the network has established regular relations with the European institutions (the European Commission and then the Parliament), these academic experts make way for experts coming from the cities' staff and personnel. Analysing how urban expertise used and produced by this network evolves, enables us to demonstrate how it progressively meets European institutions' expectations. It also underlines some of the ways local actors (elected or appointed by cities and their local authorities) may make use of European institutions. Thanks to the expertise it produces and/or uses, this network is therefore revealed as a tool of empowerment, though undoubtedly tricky to control, for those cities who wish to avoid the state-level of decision making by directly addressing the European level.

The Lisbon Treaty introduced the Early Warning Mechanism into the EU decision-making process, under which National Parliaments monitor the subsidiarity compliance of EU legislative proposals. Whilst it is argued that in doing so they meet a collective action problem, National Parliaments have triggered the mechanism twice so far (COM/2012/0130/‘Monti II' and COM/2013/0534/‘EPPO'). This paper analyzes how Parliaments managed to overcome the identified problem in these cases. It is demonstrated that they used to this end effective leadership and communication in the sense of inter-parliamentary cooperation in order to reduce uncertainty about the actions of other Parliaments and subsequently about the prospects of successful collective action.

The analysis of the three Portuguese labour code reforms implemented during the last decade (in 2003, 2009 and 2012) calls for an evaluation of the European pressures exerted by the European Commission to increase labour market and work organization flexibility. Comparing the decision-making processes and political debates which arose for each of the three reforms shall shed light on the multifaceted influence of the European Commission, i.e ., on the institutionnal context in which policies are adopted (polity), on the configuration of political actors (politics) and on the contents of policy measures (policies). This article will then analyse the two-level games of those political actors and the role of European integration in the politicization processes of employment policies.