This paper studies the internal dimension of regulatory governance in the EU by focusing on new forms of ‘experimentalist’ governance, defined as a recursive process of provisional goal-setting and revision based on learning from the comparison of alternative approaches to advancing them in different contexts, often organized as a multi-level architecture. While this new architecture has become pervasively institutionalized through a variety of pathways (e.g., fora, networked agencies, councils of regulators, open methods of coordination (OMCs), and/or more generally processes) and covering a broad array of policy domains, we still know little about its effects as opposed to its emergence.
By drawing on the literature on the European Commission as key actor in the EU, the paper asks about under what conditions the Commission engages in experimentalist policymaking. It substantiates its claims by using energy as case study, where there has been a progressive creation of stronger European bodies but also the spread of experimentalist architectures. Within this economic policy field, it studies paired cases across distinct domains (i.e., same issue-areas across power and gas) characterized by the same experimentalist institutions and similar additional aspects (e.g., distribution of legal powers), but that vary in terms of overall dominant type of policymaking.
By using the method of process tracing and combining comparisons across cases and over time, it aims at inductively developing hypotheses about the micro-foundations of experimentalist governance in practice, or experimentalist policymaking. Thus, it discusses issues directly relevant to the ‘Regulatory Governance in the EU’ Section, notably the strategies of the Commission towards experimentalist institutions and how it seeks to use them for its own purposes, as well as the effects of experimentalist institutions on policymaking.
