Regulatory Governance in the EU

This section invites panel and paper proposals on regulatory governance in the EU across a wide range of policy fields - economic, social and cultural - in both their internal and external dimensions. We are particularly interested in current trends and transformations in the scope, forms, functions and consequences of EU regulatory governance. Is EU regulatory governance becoming more uniform, centralized and supranationalized, e.g. through the creation of stronger European agencies and regulatory authorities, single rule books, prescriptive ‘one-size-fits-all’ recommendations, and standardized implementation and enforcement procedures? Or do recent developments in fields such as energy, telecommunications, data privacy, competition, environmental protection, food safety, financial regulation, and socio-economic governance still leave substantial space for accommodation of national diversity and revision in light of local implementation experience, in line with theories of networked regulation and experimentalist governance? The section welcomes discussion of variations in the development of EU regulatory governance to identify and trace explanatory factors. How has this differed across different dimensions - for instance, legal, political and symbolic? Are trends common across domains or are there important cross-domain variations - for instance, between economic sectors, or between economic, social and cultural regulation - and if so, why? What are the strategies of actors towards the changing shape of EU regulation and how do they seek to use it for their own purposes? How does EU regulation impact on the preferences, strategies and even identities of actors? We also welcome papers that compare the external and internal dimensions of EU regulatory governance, and include discussion of the interactions between European and non-European organisations, placing EU regulation in a wider international context.