ABSTRACT
This volume is concerned with changes in European governance. In EC social policy, such changes were manifold and even occurred at the level of formal Treaty changes in the 1990s. The move towards co-operative publicprivate governance was only the most prominent aspect, the process of change having concerned basically all characteristic elements of a ‘system of governance’ (see Kohler-Koch, in this volume). Thus, innovation occurred at the levels of:
• belief systems about appropriate principles of action (shared responsibility between the European and national levels according to horizontal and vertical subsidiarity principles); • actor constellations (a few privileged interest groups were incorporated into EC decision-making on public policies); • decision-making routines (very specific processes were established), and • boundaries (territorial exclusion of the UK; functional exclusion of various aspects of social policy).
