ABSTRACT
The European Employment Strategy (EES) was created in the mid-1990s. Its goal is to coordinate Member States’ various attempts to address persistently high levels of unemployment and low employment rates. The main instruments used in the strategy form part of a cycle including Employment Guidelines, National Action Plans for Employment, and the EU’s Joint Employment Report, which includes country-specific recommendations. Similar cycles exist in other policy areas and this mode of governance has been termed the ‘Open Method of Coordination’ (OMC). Despite revisions in 2003 and 2004, the basic principles of the EES remain the same. The impact of this cycle and its accompanying peer-review processes on the
employment policies of the Member States has been a matter of controversy for many years. An evaluation conducted by the European Commission in 2002 concluded that even though the main employment policy features in some countries were already in place prior to the Luxembourg summit, the EES had 1) strengthened national policy frameworks and focused attention on targets and deadlines; 2) started a process of convergence between Member States’ employment policies towards increased activation and prevention of long-term unemployment for specific target groups; 3) supported the process of convergence; 4) ensured that policies had been maintained and reshaped in line with the strategy in countries where active labour market policies (ALMP) were already in place; 5) inspired employment policy reforms among some of the ‘laggards’; 6) impacted policies other than ALMP; and 7) improved interministerial coordination and the involvement of regional authorities, social partners, and NGOs (European Commission 2002: 11-13). However, when examining the national reports behind the evaluation, it is
difficult to point to more than a few specific examples of EES impact on nationallevel employment policy. This is especially true regarding the content of the policy (the employment policy programmes and economic resources spent on them). The evaluation as well as other studies (e.g. Jacobsson and Schmid 2001; Foden 1999; Langhoff-Ross 2001; Umbach 2003; López-Santana 2004) indicate that the impact on policy processes (e.g. coordination among governmental
departments; consultation with social partners, NGOs, and regional governments; the use of evaluations and statistics etc.) has been more profound. More recent studies largely confirm this picture. Building on seven national case studies examining the impact of the EES and the EU’s Social Inclusion Strategy, Zeitlin (2005) concludes that these strategies have contributed to shifts in national policy orientation and thinking (for instance, from reducing unemployment rates to increasing employment), as well as shifts in specific policy areas, most importantly in relation to gender equality. Zeitlin’s study confirms that the impact on national policy procedures has been more profound. Further, Zeitlin finds great variation betweenMember States as well as between the two OMCs in terms of the extent to which the national parliaments, the social partners and the NGOs play a role in the process. According to this author, mutual learning has taken place between Member States, largely in terms of identifying common challenges and potentially successful approaches, rather than learning from cases of good practice. These studies offer some insight into the impact of the EES on national
employment policies. However, most of these studies are limited to the period before 2002 – that is, before the first revision of the strategy in 2003. Furthermore, it is difficult to compare findings across Member States, because the studies tend to focus on one or two countries at most and do not use a commonmethodology. Systematic comparisons of the impact in more than twoMember States are rare.1
