Armstrong, Kenneth A. --- "Inclusive Governance? Civil Society and the Open Method of Co-ordination" [2006] ELECD 132; in Smismans, Stijn (ed), "Civil Society and Legitimate European Governance" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: Civil Society and Legitimate European Governance

Editor(s): Smismans, Stijn

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843769460

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Inclusive Governance? Civil Society and the Open Method of Co-ordination

Author(s): Armstrong, Kenneth A.

Number of pages: 26

Extract:

3. Inclusive governance? Civil society
and the open method of co-ordination*
Kenneth A. Armstrong

INTRODUCTION

The point of departure for this chapter lies in a criticism made by Stijn
Smismans that much of the discourse on the role of civil society in European
Union (EU) governance has under-valued and under-analysed the role of civil
society actors in `new modes of governance' (Smismans 2003: 490). This
chapter also picks up the thread of an argument raised in an earlier work that
criticised the European Commission's White Paper on European Governance
(European Commission 2001) as overly-preoccupied with attaching civil
society to the institutional apparatus of the `Community Method' of legislative
governance while underplaying the potential of civil society actors within new
modes of governance like the `open method of co-ordination' (`OMC')
(Armstrong 2002). The ambition of this contribution is, therefore, to seek to
account for civil society in new modes of governance like the OMC.
It would be useful to describe the role that civil society actors are, or are not,
playing in OMC processes. Indeed, it would be of value to compare and
contrast the degrees of civil society participation in different OMC processes
and across different Member States. Nonetheless, the principal preoccupation
of this chapter rests in articulating the conceptual basis through which to
account for, or indeed critique, civil society's role in OMC from the
perspective of democratic constitutionalism.
The argument develops in the following way. In the first section, the
principal ...