ABSTRACT
Economic globalization, demographic ageing, and changing household/family structures confront European employment and welfare regimes with new challenges. Hence national governments find themselves under pressure to reform their social and labour-market policies. These are common challenges for the Member States of the European Union, as well as for the EU itself, due to the linkages between the increasingly Europeanized regulation of markets for capital, goods, and services, together with monetary and (to a lesser extent) fiscal policies, on the one hand, and the still predominantly national regulation of labour markets and social protection systems on the other. Hence in March 2000, the European Council decided at Lisbon to strengthen national economic, employment, and social policy reforms in order ‘to make the EU the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with full employment and greater social cohesion’ by 2010. The principal device for attaining these goals was the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), annunciated in Lisbon as a broadly applicable new governance instrument, and building on innovative approaches to the coordination of Member State policies that had been developed over the preceding decade, most notably the European Employment Strategy (EES) inaugurated in 1997.1
The core features of the OMC are iterative benchmarking of national progress towards common European objectives and organized mutual learning. Despite procedural variations across different policy domains, most developed OMC processes comprise four central elements:
1 joint definition by Member State governments and the European Commission of initial objectives, indicators, and often but not always guidelines and targets;
2 national action plans or strategy reports, which assess performance in light of the objectives and metrics, and propose corrective reforms adapted to domestic institutions and circumstances;
3 peer review of these national plans, including mutual criticism and exchange of good practices, backed up in some cases by recommendations from the Commission and the Council;
4 re-elaboration of the national plans and, at less frequent intervals, of the broader European objectives and metrics in light of the experience gained in their implementation.2
