Moving the EU from a Laggard to a Leader in Democracy Assistance: The Potential Role of the European Endowment for Democracy. CEPS Policy Brief No. 273, 15 June 2012

In their assessment of the proposed European Endowment for Democracy (EED), Hrant Kostanyan and Magdalena Nasieniak conclude that an instrument along the lines currently envisaged could and should take on the challenge to make the EU a truly committed, pro-active and effective leader of democracy assistance. A flexible and fast-track path of assessing needs and granting funds could become the most visible results of the EU’s assistance in this area, delivering almost immediate tangible results. They argue that the EED therefore needs to become an instrument free of nationally-driven decisions, European ‘turf wars’ and cumbersome bureaucracy.

The Dynamics of Decentralization in Italy: Towards a Federal Solution? European Diversity and Autonomy Papers, EDAP/04 2013

This paper analyses the recent process of state decentralisation in Italy from the perspectives of political science and constitutional law. It considers the conflicting pressures and partisan opportunism of the decentralising process, and how these have adversely affected the consistency and completeness of the new constitutional framework. The paper evaluates the major institutional reforms affecting state decentralisation, including the 2001 constitutional reform and the more recent legislation on fiscal federalism. It argues that while the legal framework for decentralisation remains unclear and contradictory in parts, the Constitutional Court has performed a key role in interpreting the provisions and giving life to the decentralised system, in which regional governments now perform a much more prominent role. This new system of more decentralised multi-level government must nevertheless contend with a political culture and party system that remains highly centralised, while the administrative apparatus has undergone no comparable shift to take account of state decentralisation, leading to the duplication of bureaucracy at all territorial levels and continuing conflicts over policy jurisdiction. Unlike in federal systems these conflicts cannot be resolved in Italy through mechanisms of “shared rule”, since formal inter-governmental coordination structure are weak and entirely consultative.

Why the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) is bad for you: a letter to the EU. Research Papers in Law, 5/2006

From the Introduction. The aim of the present “letter” is to provoke, rather than to prove. It is intended to further stimulate the – already well engaged – scientific dialogue on the open method of coordination (OMC).1 This explains why some of the arguments put forward are not entirely new, while others are overstretched. This contribution, belated as it is entering into the debate, has the benefit of some hindsight. This hindsight is based on three factors (in chronological order): a) the fact that the author has participated himself as a member of a national delegation in one of the OMC-induced benchmarking exercises (only to see the final evaluation report getting lost in the Labyrinth of the national bureaucracy, despite the fact that it contained an overall favorable assessment), as well as in a OECD led exercise of coordination, concerning regulatory reform; b) the extremely rich and knowledgeable academic input, offering a very promising theoretical background for the OMC; and c) some recent empirical research as to the efficiency of the OMC, the accounts of which are, to say the least, ambiguous. This recent empirical research grounds the basic assumption of the present paper: that the OMC has only restricted, if not negligible, direct effects in the short term, while it may have some indirect effects in the medium-long term (2). On the basis of this assumption a series of arguments against the current “spread” of the OMC will be put forward (3). Some proposals on how to neutralize some of the shortfalls of the OMC will follow (4).