The Peer-review Meetings in the European Employment Strategy: Dynamics, Opportunities and Limits for Member States' Learning

WP-LPF 1/12

This paper fits in with those studies which, relying on a ‘Europeanization’ perspective, have tried to assess the influence that EU open coordination processes (Open method of coordination-OMC) can possibly produce on member states’ (MS) policies. Notably, this paper focuses on a single component of those processes: the Peer-review meetings (PR) which have been held since 1999 in the framework of the European Employment Strategy (EES). Being the aim of those meetings the promotion of dynamics of ‘mutual-learning’ and policy transfer among the participant countries, they have the potentiality for being a central venue through which EU OMC can exert an influence on MS’ policies. Nevertheless, the academic literature has seldom studied them. This paper tries to plug that gap. First of all, we will provide a description of those meetings: their organization, their evolution and the roles of participating actors. Second, mainly relying on the literature on policy and organizational learning, we will try to assess potentialities and the limits for MS’ learning arising from those meetings. Finally, we will advance some hypothesis about the path of the influence possibly exerted by those meetings on the national levels (identifying the relevant facilitating and constraining factors), thus providing some elements for sketching a ‘map’ that guides further empirical analysis on national cases.