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Qui Exanimis Nascitur? Can “Better Regulation” in the European Union really be a Servant of Technocracy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2017

Morten JARLBÆK PEDERSEN
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Abstract

Better regulation is of grave importance to the European Union, as it is seen as a way of obtaining output legitimacy. To achieve this, the European Commission has established a so-called REFIT Stakeholder Platform where stakeholders’ proposals for more effective and efficient EU law are discussed. The central premise for this meta-regulatory instrument is depoliticisation of the REFIT program and the whole better regulation agenda. To ensure this, the European Commission plays a crucial gatekeeping role by only granting access for proposals that echo that premise and by securing depoliticised deliberation afterwards. Utilising a novel typology linking regulatory reform proposals to the risk of politicisation, the argument advanced in this article is that only a minority of the proposals to be considered by Platform members have a low risk of depoliticisation. This, it is argued, is due to the Commission not having a sufficiently well-developed understanding of the premises for REFIT it has itself established.

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Articles
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European Journal of Risk Regulation , Volume 8 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue on the Implementation in Europe of the WHO Recommendations on Food Marketing to Children , June 2017 , pp. 387 - 402
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© Cambridge University Press 

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Footnotes

*

PhD student at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. This article is a result of a research project on sources of better regulation in Denmark and the EU co-sponsored by the Confederation of Danish Enterprise (“Dansk Erhverv”). A previous version of this paper was presented at a seminar held at the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen in May 2016. The author wishes to thank everyone participating – especially associate professor Manuele Citi, Copenhagen Business School, and the department’s own post.doc. Lars Kai Mäder and PhD student Benjamin Carl Krag Egerod – for critical, yet very valuable ideas and comments. The author also wishes to thank Professor Peter Nedergaard, Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, for useful comments on earlier drafts.

References

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