Thursday, July 13, 2017
WMB - Hugh Fraser Seminar Room 2 (University of Glasgow)
The recent challenges posed to European integration primarily affect the European Commission’s political role in the process of EU policy-making. Moreover, the Commission is also under increasing pressure to adapt its internal set-up. In this paper, we take a comparative perspective on the changes in the Commission’s internal management over the last decade. While scholars have extensively studied institutional changes induced by the so-called Kinnock, systematic investigations that put the reform efforts in the Commission into a comparative perspective are rare. This dearth of comparative research is surprising given that most international administrations have been subject to substantial political pressures for improving their internal management. In order move beyond the ostensible sui generis verdict in EU studies and determine how management reforms in the Commission can be fruitfully compared, we focus on four central areas of administrative reform: personnel and financial management, strategic planning and transparency. Our primary goal is to develop an empirical yardstick that allows us to compare these dimensions of institutional change in the Commission to management reforms in other international organizations. While the main goal of this comparative exercise is to learn from the lessons of the Commission case for reform efforts in other IOs, it may also provide insights for the Commission bureaucracy in a time in which the EU’s raison d'être is increasingly questioned.
