ABSTRACT
The Community institutions have stressed the ‘participatory nature’ of new governance, with which they mean, above all, the involvement of the relevant ‘stakeholders’ and ‘civil society organisations’ rather than direct citizen participation.1 This participatory discourse has been particularly developed in relation to the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) (De la Porte and Nanz 2004; De la Porte and Pochet 2005; Smismans 2005a; Armstrong 2006), but it extends to a broader ‘civil society’ discourse developed by the Community institutions over recent years, in particular by the Commission and the European Economic and Social Committee (Armstrong 2002; Smismans 2003a; Bouwen 2007).
