1 research outputs found
Modes of external governance: a cross-national and crosssectoral comparison
Contrary to the wide majority of studies that try to characterise EU external governance by
looking at the macro structures of association relations, our comparative analysis shows that
overarching foreign policy initiatives such as the EEA, Swiss-EU Bilateralism or the ENP
have little impact on the modes how the EU seeks to expand its policy boundaries in
individual sectors. In contrast, modes of external governance follow sectoral dynamics which
are astonishingly stable across countries. These findings highlight the importance of
institutional path-dependencies in projecting governance modes from the internal to the
external constellation, and question the capacity to steer these functionalist patterns of
external governance through rationally planned foreign policy initiatives