This workshop on "Law and New Approaches to Governance in Europe" to be held at the UW-Madison’s International Institute on May 29 and 30, 2001, will be co-sponsored by the European Union Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the European Law Journal, and UW Institute for Legal Studies.
If we look around, we can see that new regulatory approaches are emerging to replace conventional top-down, command and control regulatory systems. The adherents of these approaches seek to deal with policy problems through open, decentralized, and flexible procedures that encourage participation of all stakeholders, foster democratic deliberation and collective learning, and promote continuous improvement. They employ such novel methods as network creation, coordinated data collection, benchmarking, monitoring, feedback, and revisable standards. Accompanying these developments in governance is an increasing emphasis on proceduralization of law. The new approach moves away from rule-centered models of law towards a proceduralist understanding that stresses law’s role in structuring procedures, ensuring transparency, and fostering participation. As a result, it calls on us to change our views of the role of law and lawyers.
One can see evidence of these new approaches on both sides of the Atlantic. While in the United States what many scholars have done points toward "democratic experimentalism", European scholars have begun to speak of "deliberative supranationalism". The European Commission’s Forward Studies Unit has recently entered the debate in a series of reports, conferences, and recommendations that point to more open and participatory approaches which stress stakeholder participation and collective learning and in which the public sector plays a constitutive role. Some of these ideas can be found in the thinking that underlies the EU’s move towards what is now called the "open method of coordination" and which was touted at the Lisbon Summit.
These developments create a challenge for legal and policy studies on both sides of the Atlantic. We need to explore the theoretical roots of the move toward these approaches, catalogue the various experiments underway, assess their impact, and explore their implications for policy makers, stakeholders, legal theory and lawyering. The May 2001 Workshop on Law and New Approaches to Governance in Europe has two objectives: (1) to identify and assess some of the new approaches to governance emerging in Europe, and (2) to explore the possibility of a continuing transatlantic dialogue on governance.
(1) An European Law Journal Symposium on New Approaches to Governance in Europe The first part of the workshop will study the current scene in Europe. We will identify specific processes and experiments that reflect a "post-regulatory" approach to governance in the EU. We will look for processes that depart from top down, expert regulatory models and move towards more flexible approaches that operate at appropriate levels, encourage participation and deliberation, stress collective learning and problem-solving, employ information as a regulatory tool, promote experimentalism, and/or employ transparency, monitoring, and accountability. We will look at several substantive areas, including social policy and the environment, and specific governance models including the "open method of coordination".
(2) A Possible Continuing Transatlantic Dialogue The second part of the workshop will be devoted to exploration of a broader transatlantic dialogue on new approaches to governance that might be launched by the UW’s European Union Center along with partner institutions in the US and Europe. In this part, we will explore several parallel projects getting underway in the US and Europe, and assess prospects for a continuing dialogue in the area.