Paper Titles & Abstracts

The paper addresses the question how collaborative policy-making works in the new member states. Requirements to introduce and apply the mechanisms of collaborative governance, namely, partnerships between public and civil society actors, flow from the European Commission as a part of a massive process of Europeanisation of policy-making modes and techniques in addition to content of policies. Yet what one observes on the ground is numerous reported failures of application of these requirements. The literatures on transposition of EU rules and Europeanisation offer their explanations of why this is occurring by looking at country-level "grand" institutional traditions and entrenched practices and thus treat CEE member states as one homogenous case. The paper nuances these accounts by stating that what one sees is an active process of contestation over the meanings of these requirements with actors employing a variety or arguments. These arguments are not related to institutional traditions or practices (of collaborative policy-making, in this case) but are rooted in institutional identities and interests of actors and triggered by the practice of EU policy-making itself. The paper summarizes the findings of research on practices of implementation of partnership principle in four CEE member states - Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. It presents the results of the qualitative analysis of data obtained through 70 semi-structured interviews in four countries - a map of arguments used by participating actors in defense of their ideas of partnership. The data indicates there are several "common" discourses in use across the countries (democracy, participation etc.) and several country-specific ones (managerialist, oversight etc.). Drawing on the literature on collaborative partnerships in public policy and implementation of norms in IR, the paper discusses how these "CEE specifics" can be explained and whether further generalizations about application of EU requirements can be made.