Governing Social Inclusion: Europeanization through Policy Coordination
Kenneth A. Armstrong
Abstract
Strategies and policies to combat poverty and social exclusion have traditionally been developed within the boundaries of nation states. For European Union Member States, these strategies and policies have been subject to the increasing influence of EU governance. Since 2000, policy coordination through the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) has served as the key vehicle for the Europeanization of domestic strategies and policies. This book explores the possibilities of, and limits to, the Europeanization of domestic social policy. Notwithstanding substantial changes at the constitutional, gove ... More
Strategies and policies to combat poverty and social exclusion have traditionally been developed within the boundaries of nation states. For European Union Member States, these strategies and policies have been subject to the increasing influence of EU governance. Since 2000, policy coordination through the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) has served as the key vehicle for the Europeanization of domestic strategies and policies. This book explores the possibilities of, and limits to, the Europeanization of domestic social policy. Notwithstanding substantial changes at the constitutional, governance, and policy levels through the Lisbon Treaty and a decade of the Lisbon Strategy, the identity and purposes of institutionalizing EU social policy interventions remains unsettled. At the same time, domestic polities, politics, and policies act as institutional mediators of EU pressures to modernize and reform domestic social policies. After a decade of EU intervention, the percentage of households at risk of income poverty has barely changed. Yet, economic and political retrenchment in the wake of a global recession makes the need to strengthen governance tools and to enhance coordination both more urgent and more difficult.
Keywords:
poverty,
governance,
Europeanization,
social policy,
social exclusion,
nation states,
policy coordination,
Lisbon strategy
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2010 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780199278374 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2011 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199278374.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Kenneth A. Armstrong, author
Professor of European Union Law, Queen Mary, University of London
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