What is the future of the OMC?

This book has charted both the development and the practice of the Open Method of Coordination, from its original promise, to its numerous challenges and failings. It has sought to conceptualise its relationship to law, in order to consider not just the policy outcomes of ‘new governance’, but also the legal and political relationships that it has created. As we have seen, the OMC is part of a significant ‘transformation’ in the dominant governing instruments of EU law. This challenge has not only altered our view of what ‘rule-making’ in a post-national setting means, but also provoked extensive anxieties among important domestic and European actors. The ‘rise of new governance’ has signified the entry of both a new descriptive reality, and a new set of normative concerns, over the future of the EU legal order.

One wonders, however, if this ‘rise’ is to be accompanied by a fall. What is the future of methods like the OMC, and how might that future be different from the practice of ‘new governance’ in the present day? While the late 1990s, and early part of this decade, saw an explosion of open coordination onto the European scene, there are numerous reasons to be sceptical about its place in the EU’s legal order in the coming decades. These concerns emerge both from external developments, and from the tensions outlined in the substantive parts of this thesis.