| In most Western democracies new forms of governance, manifested by horizontal/interactive ways of policymaking and initiatives of (semi)self-steering, come into practice. These forms of governance are often claimed to handle the complexity of societal questions and to increase innovation and problem solving capacities. Classical-modern (formal) institutions however, do not simply evade and we must be aware of the fact that they can hamper the development of these new forms of governance. Especially EU requirements seem to impose barriers for these new forms of governance. The research objective of this project is to get a better understanding of these barriers and to provide insight in how to overcome them. To do so, we will in this research move away from a pure legalistic explanation. It is our belief (based on both empirical as theoretical insights) that we must acquire a detailed understanding of how both national and European actors attribute meaning to, and deal with these requirements, specifically in interaction processes. The statement that `Europe will condemn it¿ is a too simple explanation. It is our hypothesis that ongoing interaction processes affect how actors give meaning to EU requirements and how they behave, and thereby influences largely the possibilities of new forms of governance. |
