Implication of governance change in EU’s ICT policy on European governance

<p>　The European Union (EU) has launched a economic strategy (Lisbon strategy) in 2000, and re-launched an improved version of the strategy (Europe 2020) in 2010. Both strategies were attempted to boost growth, competitiveness and employment. The EU understood that ICT (information communication technology) would contribute to growth, competitiveness and growth, and introduced many ICT-related policies. To promote policy convergence between member states, the EU adopted the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) to policies that related to the Lisbon strategy. The OMC emphasized participation of public-private actors and mutual policy learning between member states, all of which are contrasted to the Community Method that was usually applied to promote a single market. Scholars emphasized that the OMC was different mode of governance from the Community Method, and developed the study of "New Mode of Governance". However, the Lisbon strategy could not achieve its goals and OMC failed to promote mutual policy learning as well as public-private partnership. The re-launched strategy, Europe 2020, abandoned the word of "OMC" in the official policy documents, and started to emphasize that multi-stakeholders partnership and ownership by these stakeholders would assure achievements of policies and goals. This paper focuses on such alteration of policy tools, and casts doubts on the "newness" of EU governance.</p><p>　After this paper examines the shift from the Community Method to OMC as well as the shift from OMC to policy tools in Europe 2020, it concludes that actors' participation, (voluntary) policy learning and ownership are not new phenomena: private actors and voluntary policy learning by stakeholders could be found in the single market issues which scholars categorize as the old mode (Community Method), and a fiscal surveillance system in the EU uses the concept of ownership. This paper also touches on why and how the EU study has come to use the concept of governance that was originally developed in the study of international relation study, and reveals that the original concept of governance in international relation study covers actors' participation as well as ownership. The developments of EU's policy tools so far cannot be seen as "New Mode" of governance.</p>