European Union Center

Sponsors

• The European Union Center of Excellence
• The Wisconsin Project on Governance and Regulation (WISGAR)
• The Center for World Affairs and the Global Economy (WAGE) Governance Project
• The Governance Research Circle, with support from the Division of International Studies, the International Institute and Global Studies

Workshop Description

In recent years the US and Europe have seen the emergence of a new approaches to state-society relations. Critics of government regulation and the administrative state from the left and right have called for alternatives to conventional top-down, command and control regulatory systems. Innovations have been introduced and older non-traditional approaches given new emphasis. Devolution, public-private partnerships, negotiated regulation, network creation, coordinated data collection, benchmarking, monitoring, feedback, and revisable standards are being tried out. The whole phenomenon is often referred to as “new governance” although some of these techniques have been around for a long time.

Because these approaches have been presented as alternatives to traditional “command and control” regulation, this growing emphasis on “new governance” may lead to a restructuring of relationships among markets, government, society and the professions and change the way modern law is created and administered. For some, these changes are modest and supplemental. From this viewpoint, new governance emerges because there are a number of discreet areas, issues, or political constellations that make it necessary to supplement traditional legal modalities. But, in this view, these innovations will leave the core of the legal order intact. For others, however, new governance may be a supplement, but it is a Derridian “dangerous supplement,” one that provides a fundamental challenge to the theory and practice of law that may lead to major transformations.

The workshop is designed to examine the debate over the origins and nature of new governance and its potential impact on legal theory and practice.

Workshop Participants

Invited participants include David Trubek, Joanne Scott, Gráinne de Búrca, Tamara Hervey, Neil Walker, William Simon, Orly Lobel, Martha Minow, Charles Sabel, Jonathan Zeitlin, Imelda Maher, Victoria Nourse, John Ohnesorge, Marc Galanter, and Patrick Cottrell.

For more information, please contact Patrick Cottrell (mpcottrell@wisc.edu).