Abstract
This article adopts an organization-centered and pragmatist approach in order to analyze Europeanization as a learning process in the field of public policy. This approach opposes the established view, which understands national ENGOs’ (environmental non-governmental organizations’) activism as a process that is simply responsive to European opportunities according to their resources and values/preferences. The concept of organizational learning re-establishes the organization as the unit of analysis and as an explanatory factor of the strategies related to the European Union (EU) arena. Defined as a ‘learning-by-doing’ process, organizational learning consists of discovering and exploiting the EU multilevel game, while mobilizing internal resources for this purpose. The proposed analytical framework enriches the empirical discussion of the way in which French ENGOs deal with the uncertainty of multilevel policymaking, while discussing the strategic dimension of their EU activism.
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Notes
The second view has been mostly adopted by the studies on interest group, social movement organizations and NGOs (Beyers, 2008, p. 1194).
Significantly, for della Porta and Caiani (2009), the two privileged modes of framing EU-related political issues are externalization – exporting the conflict at the EU level – and domestication – addressing the national authorities. ‘Transnationalization’ of the collective action remains limited.
The application of the political opportunities structure concept to the EU has led to few developments, given the analytical challenges it raises (see Berny, 2013).
At the beginning of the 2000s, the EU Environmental policy with 708 texts was reported by the European Commission as recording the most numerous infringements with EU-Legislation and Tertiary-Legislation committees (so-called comitology committee). This is still the case in 2012, while the EU is signatory of 30 environmental international treaties.
Morris (2000) argues that the concept of a political opportunity structure, which refers to the contextual factors that shape the collective action process, has actually reinforced this bias, when combined with a RMT approach.
This focus on creativity emerging from present situations diverges from March (1991), who considers routines and procedures to account for organizational change, which matches with his sociological institutionalism perspective (Börzel and Risse, 2000).
A more in-depth analysis of organizational properties has been developed in Berny (2013).
This was validated by the adoption of the long-term ‘Action Program Promoting European ENGOs’, Council decision 97/872.
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Berny, N. Europeanization as organizational learning: When French ENGOs play the EU multilevel policy game. Fr Polit 11, 217–240 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2013.8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2013.8