The EU standardization system is in constant flux. Recent judicial rulings and the adoption of a value-based standardization strategy has given further impetus to the consolidation of the system but also highlighted its importance from a geopolitical standpoint (Kanevskaia et al., 2024). Importantly for our purposes, it also turned a spotlight on the dynamics of public-private interactions in EU standard-setting. However, in view of the continuous evolution of the system, the field is increasingly undertheorized (but Schepel, 2005; Eliantonio & Cauffman, 2020). Against this background, we use the concept of regulatory space (Hancher and Moran, 1989) to describe the evolution of the standardization landscape in the EU. Regulatory space as an analytical construct encompasses a range of regulatory issues in a community and calls for an analysis of that setting in terms of its specific political, legal and cultural attributes, with a distinct focus on customary and dynamic patterns of organizational relationships. We extend previous work that mapped public-private interactions in the field of EU ICT standardization (Delimatsis and Verghese, 2024) to identify instances of fragmented authority and contestation in the EU decentralized standardization space, to map the reconfiguration of the space that the EU standardization regulation (1025/2012) brought about, and to describe the role of the State in a new geopolitical environment that calls for value-based standardization and no longer focuses on purely technical considerations. In this effort, we focus in particular on actor capacity and jurisdictional fluidity, two key concepts of the theory of regulatory space that can help explain not only interactions in a static manner but also allow for anticipating how such interactions can evolve in a dynamic manner to reshape the New Approach. The paper contributes to theories of regulation, multi-level governance, organization resilience and private collective action.
