Author: Rosa Comella

Title: New Governance fatigue? Administration and democracy in the European Union

Abstract:

I first examine new governance as the compound of multilevel and network governance.  I structure its main claims around the principles of partnership and flexibility, which serve to demote the notions of stateness, publicity, legalism, and hierarchy.  I use the Open Method of Coordination as case study.  I end this part with a critique on several counts: over-comprehensiveness, concealment of the administrative state, dubious democratic credentials, and suppression of political contestation.  A second narrative of new governance focuses on democracy and administrative law.  I explain the dynamics of administrative interweaving in the EU, exposing the interplay of difference and commonality and the resilience of stateness, publicity, legalism and hierarchy.  I use experimentalist governance as the basis for a further research agenda that would incorporate a notion of the public in administrative terms based on the premise of politics as managing differentiation.

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