Knowing your limits: Informal governance and judgment in the EU

Mareike Kleine ()

The Review of International Organizations, 2013, vol. 8, issue 2, 245-264

Abstract: The burgeoning literature on informal governance has shed new light on the workings of international organizations and the hidden rules of the game. The common thrust of these studies is that informal governance is the result of an implicit agreement among states that, in order to sustain cooperation, it can be necessary to accommodate important interests even if this seemingly goes against the organization’s purpose. Struck under conditions of uncertainty, however, implicit agreements such as this are necessarily vague, and their implementation is bound to generate conflicts that threaten to undermine the organization’s legitimacy. How, then, do states decide whether formal rules or informal governance apply? This article uses the case of the EU to propose a solution to this dilemma. The central argument is that member states have delegated the authority to adjudicate on demands for informal governance to the office of the Council Presidency. They mold the legislative agenda such that the government in office can be trusted in its judgment. The plausibility of this argument is illustrated with a description of the Presidency’s historical development and a case study on the negotiation of the EU’s controversial Working Time Directive. Apart from pointing to a missing piece in the literature on informal governance, the study holds more general lessons for the interaction of formal and informal rules as well as the information-providing role of international institutions. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Keywords: International organization; Cooperation; European Union; Informal governance; Formal rules; Adjudication; Authority; Information; F50; F53; F55; F59 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11558-012-9148-7 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:revint:v:8:y:2013:i:2:p:245-264

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... iology/journal/11558

DOI: 10.1007/s11558-012-9148-7

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of International Organizations is currently edited by A. Dreher

More articles in The Review of International Organizations from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().