DYNAMICS OF INSTITUTIONAL COOPERATION IN THE EUROPEAN UNION

The proposed ITN aims to enhance our insights in the origins, evolution and effects of institutions by focusing on forms of cooperative decision- and policy-making and by examining how they in turn how they have an impact on institutional change. When referring to cooperative procedures we mean all modes of policy-making based on jointly taken decisions in a more or less formalized framework of cooperation between different institutional actors.

When looking at forms of institutional cooperation in the EU decision-making process, we can distinguish the following three levels of institutional cooperation:

Table 1: Dimensions of ‘institutional cooperation’ in European governance

Adapted from: Christiansen, Thomas. "Intra-insitutional politics and inter-institutional relations in the EU: towards coherent governance?" Journal of European Public Policy 8:5 (October 2001): 747-769.

Since cooperation usually melds all important actors and institutions of both the national and the European level into policy-making structures, our research will refer to all three dimensions outlined above.

This gives rise to two main research clusters:

• Firstly, this research network will systematically explore forms of cooperation in inter-level, inter-institutional and intra-institutional settings.
• Secondly, the network will conduct research on specific sectoral policies, using case studies focusing both on the Community method and on forms of cooperation within the second and third pillars of the EU.

These clusters are not distinctly separate but interlinked: the empirical data provided by the case studies of the second research cluster will feed the analysis on institutional cooperation in the first cluster. This approach will enable us to come to more far-reaching and comparative explanations and enable us to understand how cooperation works under different decision-making rules (or indeed without rules).