ABSTRACT
This whole book is about ‘policy making’ in one way or another. This chapter, however, focuses on the steps leading to the adoption of a particular policy. Policy making comes after the point at which a political issue has been placed on the policy agenda (see Chapter 11), but before the process of implementation kicks in (Chapter 12). It is the stage in the policy process when policy makers have to decide what to do about a particular issue, assuming, of course, that they have decided to do something. There will usually be a range of possible policy options to choose between, some of which may bear upon policies developed in other sectors (Chapter 13). Although many of these options will be investigated and subsequently negotiated over, only one will be eventually selected. For the sake of convenience, this long and at times highly recursive choice process is often divided into two main steps: policy formulation and decision making. These two steps
This chapter examines the process through which legislative proposals are selected and adopted at EU level. In the past, this process, which brings together many different actors operating at different levels of governance, has tended to be rather open and unpredictable. In the 2000s, attempts were made to introduce greater formality and predictability by employing the ‘standard operating procedure’ of Impact Assessment (IA). This chapter outlines the two main parts of the policy-making process (namely policy formulation and decision making) and analyses how far IA has succeeded in imposing a more formal procedure on them. It reveals that while the European Commission has made greater use of IA, the other EU institutions have not. Furthermore, it is still unclear if IA can completely proceduralize policy making, given the very many sources of unpredictability.
