Extending Experimentalist Governance? ─ The European Union and Transnational Regulation

Extending Experimentalist Governance? takes as its point of departure three observations about the current state of transnational regulation within and beyond the EU:

-Across a wide and expanding range of policy fields, the EU has developed over the past 15 years a new architecture of experimentalist governance based on framework rule making and revision through recursive review of implementation experience in diverse local contexts.
-Through a variety of institutional mechanisms and channels, the EU is actively seeking to extend its own internal rules, norms, standards, and governance processes beyond the Union's borders to third countries and the wider world.
-In a number of major issue-areas, experimentalist regimes with similar architectural features to those within the EU appear to be developing on a global or transnational scale.

The book's goal is to explore, both empirically and theoretically, the relationship between these three contemporaneous trends, and to assess their consequences for the EU's evolving role in transnational regulation. The book tackles these questions about the external dimension of EU experimentalist governance and its relationship to broader trends in transnational regulation through in-depth analysis of recent developments across a series of key policy domains by a distinguished interdisciplinary group of European and North American scholars. The domains addressed include neighbourhood policy, food safety, GMOs, chemicals, forestry, competition, finance, data privacy, disability rights, crisis management, justice, and security.

Jonathan Zeitlin is Distinguished Faculty Professor of Public Policy and Governance in the Political Science Department at the University of Amsterdam, and Founding Scientific Director of the Amsterdam Centre for Contemporary European Studies (ACCESS EUROPE). His current research focuses on experimentalist governance within and beyond the EU. Recent publications includeExperimentalist Governance in the European Union: Toward a New Architecture (Oxford University Press, 2010); 'Experimentalist Governance', in David Levi-Faur (ed.),The Oxford Handbook of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2012); and 'Assembling an Experimentalist Regime: Transnational Governance Interactions in the Forest Sector',Regulation & Governance (2014).