The Coordination of the European Union

Dr. Andrew Jordan is Reader in Environmental Politics and Philip Leverhulme Prize Fellow in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. He is a Manager of the ESRC Programme on Environmental Decision-making (PEDM) in the Centre for Social and Economic Research on the Global Environment's (CSERGE). He has edited the international journal Environment and Planning C (Government and Policy) since 1998, and published over a hundred peer reviewed papers and chapters, as well as eight books on different aspects of contemporary environmental policy and politics. Dr Adriaan Schout works as Senior Researcher for the Clingendael European Studies Programme in the Hague (Netherlands) and as Associate Professor at the European Institute of Public Administration in Maastricht (Netherlands). He has extensively studied the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, European agencies, EU governance and the multilevel coordination of EU policies. His research has involved organizational analyses of national ministries, the Commission and the European Parliament as well as several European Agencies. He has worked for a number of different clients, including national and EU institutions.

Review from previous edition Reformers in pursuit of the holy grail of coordination would do well to heed Andrew Jordan and Adriaan Schout's careful analysis. They document not only the pros and cons of centralised solutions but also the limits to the present-day fashion for networked solutions. Governments are told to 'keep it simple', to mix coordinating strategies and to understand what they cannot do; otherwise we are doomed to recurrent policy messes. For all our sakes, I hope someone will listen this time.

• 1. Political Ambitions and Coordination Capacities: The management of horizontal and vertical interdependence ; 2. Multilevel Coordination Capacities ; 3. Environmental Policy Integration at EU Level: A catalogue of coordinating capacities ; 4. The Coordination of European Union Policy: Actor perspectives ; 5. Environmental Policy Integration: Actor perspectives ; 6. Germany: A reactive and passive coordinator? ; 7. The Netherlands: From event to issue coordination? ; 8. The United Kingdom: Strong administration but weak political ambitions? ; 9. The European Commission: An organization in transition? ; 10. The European Parliament: A partially disengaged partner? ; 11. The Coordination of the European Union: Understanding the capacities of networked governance