Horizontal Capacity Pooling: "Administrative Crowd Sourcing" As New Compliance Strategy

This paper analyses recent developments in the coordination of policy implementation in multilevel administrative settings. To this end, decentralised joint policy execution in the European Union is reviewed across various policies. The empirical findings highlight the increased strategic promotion of horizontal capacity pooling by the European Commission. This strategy offers a new form of indirect regulation: what is regulated is not public administration as such but decentralised administrative capacities. This finding diverges from the standard explanations about the emergent European Administrative Space. The contribution concludes that in the field of public administration we recently witness a shift from vertical to horizontal integration, promoted by the Commission in order to overcome long-standing shortcomings in the operational completion of the single market project due to implementation failures. In other words, compliance is not controlled vertically but fostered by building up horizontal networks between the actual implementing actors. Key to this trend is the development and improvement of new electronic tools that facilitate administrative coordination across different jurisdictions, language barriers and administrative cultures.