During the times of global financial crisis, expectations towards research to be a major driver of future growth and well-being have considerably increased. In this context, the EU has intensified its efforts to build the European Research Area (ERA) envisaging its completion by 2014 (EC 2010) and preparing an ambitious Horizon 2020 programme organized around three distinct priorities of excellent science, industrial leadership and societal challenges (EC 2011). This adds a new urgency to a long process of European research integration, in which the launch of the ERA initiative in 2000 is a novel political development towards an overarching EU multi-level research governance architecture (Borras 2003; Delanghe et al 2009; Edler et al 2003; Kuhlmann 2001; Nedeva 2013). The ERA initiative involves multiple aims such as reforms of national research systems, facilitation of transnational cooperation and competition, support for mobility of researchers and for strengthening research infrastructures. Variety of funding and soft governance instruments are used to address these goals in diverse national and local contexts. Increasingly attempts are made to develop ERA governance as a partnership between supra-national institutions, member states and variety of stakeholders.
Taking into account uncertainty, institutional heterogeneity and pluralistic power distribution in the construction of ERA, this paper will conceptualise its governance using the approach of ‘experimentalist governance’ “that establishes deliberatively provisional frameworks for action and revises these in light of recursive review of efforts to implement them in various contexts” (Sabel & Zeitlin 2012). Using multiple data sources and methods (process tracing, document analysis, secondary sources), it will analyse advantages and challenges that experimentalist governance pose for the building of ERA and finally ask some prospective questions whether ERA is evolving into a ‘directly deliberative polyarchy’, in which diverse participants through an open deliberation learn from, discipline, and set goals for one another (Ibid).
