The transformation of eu governance, the open method of coordination and the economic crisis

Celebrated by some as a ‘new’ mode of governance (Sabel and Zeitlin 2008) and experimentalist architecture (Sabel and Zeitlin 2010), and denigrated by others as a ‘red herring’ (Idema and Keleman 2006), the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) connects with major themes in EU politics and public policy, namely the Europe 2020 strategy for economic growth and competitiveness, the transformation of the Eurozone, and the emergence of a new decision-making framework within the scope of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). In this chapter we set out to rescue the OMC from this polarised debate and situate the usages of this mode of governance within the debate on the future of the Eurozone. Our main research question is to establish the role of the OMC in the current responses to the Eurozone crisis. To answer this question, we need first of all to explore the conditions that determine the performance of the OMC. We elaborate on our analysis of the literature (in Section 2) by arguing in Section 3 that three dimensions are key: the externalities generated by EU-level collaboration, the level of uncertainty regarding the content of the public action, and the degree of asymmetric distribution of costs and benefits