ABSTRACT
Although the main driving forces behind welfare reform in today’s European welfare states remain predominantly national, such processes of reform no longer take place in ‘splendid isolation’. Not only have economic internationalization and European integration constrained national governments, but contemporary welfare states are also increasingly embedded in supranational efforts to coordinate their employment and social policies. During the 1990s, the seeds for such strategies grew out of the perception that structural problems of unemployment are shared concerns, and therefore call for supranational agenda setting. In the field of labour market policies, the OECD Jobs Strategy (1994) and the European Employment Strategy (1997) are among the most important procedures of benchmarking, systematic comparison, and recommendations. In short, this process of opening up to cross-national agenda setting has created a more complex setting in which policy learning comes not only from inside (in the form of ‘trial-and-error lesson drawing’), but also from outward-looking international benchmarking (Hemerijck 2005: 47). But to what extent does welfare reform in Europe reflect learning through
such external channels? Both in academic and political circles, high hopes were raised about European-level coordination efforts. Great emphasis was put on the potential of the European Employment Strategy (EES) to elicit experimental learning, as well as on its ability to function as a cognitive and normative tool to build consensus around common objectives (Zeitlin 2005: 22). Indeed, after 10 years in operation, academic analyses of the functioning and effectiveness of policy coordination, including the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), of which the EES is the prototypical example, are abundant. Although the effectiveness of this governance tool in pushing forward convergence and adaptation of Member State policies has been the subject of fierce academic debate from its inception, more critical stances now seem to play the first fiddle. Opponents of this ‘new’ mode of governance
claim that the OMC, due to its voluntarism, has proved ‘weak’ and ‘ineffective’, leading some to predict its imminent demise (Rhodes 2006, 31-2). One source of scepticism is the lack of convincing empirical evidence of clear effects on Member States’ labour market policies, due to ‘the lack of a solid experimental background, against which to test its actual effectiveness’ (Hatzopoulos 2007: 309). Opponents therefore stress that conclusions always remain of a tentative nature. Aiming to transcend the ‘believer-non-believer’ debate, this chapter will
therefore take a different approach. Based on detailed qualitative data derived from primary sources (i.e. national legislation), we investigate the incidence, extent and nature of reforms in unemployment benefit provisions in four EU Member States (Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, and the UK). Based on this analysis, we argue that the role of international benchmarking procedures cannot be discarded so easily and has been misjudged until now. We observe that convergence is occurring, but mainly in relation to policy objectives, much less so with regard to the instruments and extent of reform. This observation leads us to examine more closely the role of international benchmarking procedures. We argue that the EES has created a supranational forum of coordination of employment policies, precisely because of its deliberative character. The OECD Jobs Strategy (JS), by contrast, does not involve such deliberative fora but rather seeks to prescribe instruments and methods in a largely unilateral way. We will therefore argue that the EES has been more effective in influencing national reform agendas in the field of labour market policy. Our findings call into question conventional theories of policy learning. On
the one hand, Peter Hall’s much-cited theory of social learning posits that a change in the hierarchy of goals (third-order learning) is necessarily preceded by minor adjustments in instruments (first-order learning) as well as by reconfigurations of policy techniques (second-order learning). Our observation of convergence of objectives but not of instruments challenges this premise. Our hypothesis is that Member States use international benchmarking procedures to determine the policy priorities and goals, rather than their detailed implementation. We argue further that the impact of these procedures occurs not only through a direct transfer of concepts, but also through cognitive influence and strategic usage. These claims are substantiated using information drawn from interviews with key policy makers at national (in Belgium and the Netherlands) and EU level. The chapter proceeds as follows. First, we identify three common trends in
unemployment protection reforms in the four countries under study and examine variations in the instruments used to attain these goals and the extent of reform. Second, by presenting the results of our interviews, we will elaborate on our claim that the EES works precisely through the prescription of goals and objectives, rather than of instruments. The third and final section will investigate to what extent our findings confirm or contradict conventional theories of policy learning.
