Session Information
23 SES 01 A, Europeanisation and Education Governance: Different levels
Paper Session
Contribution
In developing European education space, the role that different actors play in the open method of coordination (OMC) has frequently been addressed. In highlighting the OMC’s openness, decentralization and subsidiarity, the local level role has gained significant scholarly and EU institutions attention. The assessments of its role are controversial. On the one side, the ideal institutional architecture of the OMC as described in Lisbon Strategy and characterized in White Paper on European Governance highlights its crucial importance for EU effectiveness and legitimacy. In that way, it is assumed that recent social changes triggering educational reactions are concentrated at local level. The local level thereby acquires a relevant role for its capacity to value local specificities and to deal in an appropriate way with local problems. The local level therefore provides remarkable resources to bring about societal and educational change on the national/EU agenda in order to shape them proactively. The local level potential in the OMC therefore relies on bottom-up learning and therefore contributes to achieving over-arching EU goals. The OMC, which constantly seeks solutions and new usable knowledge, also enables policy makers at the national and EU levels to detect innovative solutions at local level which can be (witht the bottom-up approach) spread throughout the EU and therefore trigger convergence in European education.
Despite these various potentials of the local level, some scholars express criticism and doubt about its real involvement in national and European education policy and recognize that its role is not fully exploited. Moreover, the question about the relative weight of local knowledge versus top-down learning in the OMC remains open. Both sides agree that empirical evidence in this field is missing and that the research question addressed in this paper – “What is the real role of local level in education OMC and therefore in European education policy”? – has not yet been satisfactorily answered.
The basic objective of the paper is to fill the research gap by providing an innovative research framework for investigating the role of local level in European education policy. In this way, the theoriesabout the OMC, multilevel governance and policy learning with special emphasis on bottom-up learning will be used to introduce and explain the importance of the local level in European education policy and to highlight the empirical findings about how Ljubljana, the capital city of Slovenia, (as a local level) is involved in national and European education policymaking. Here, the paper limits itself to the policy of lifelong learning. In conducting empirical research, special emphasis will be on Ljubljana’s involvement in activities under the umbrella of the OMC and learning about policy (sharing best practices, comparing results, benchmarking etc.), but other types of informal cooperation will also be taken into consideration (EUROCITIES etc.) At the end, previously mentioned theories will be also used to critically estimate Ljubljana’s (non)involvement in the OMC and policy learning processes, to explain its (in)capability to be fully involved and to make suggestions about how local level should more proactively act is such processes.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Alexiadou, Nafsika. 2007. The Europeanisation of education policy – changing governance and »new modes of coordination, Defining the European Education Agenda. Research in Comparative and International Education 2 (2): 102-116. Bert-Jan Buiskool, Douwe Grijpstra, Carlos van Kan, Jaap van Lakerveld in Frowine den Oudendammer. 2005. Developing local learning centres and learning partnerships as part of Member States' targets for reaching the Lisbon goals in the field of education and training. A study of the current situation. Leiden: Uniersiteit Leiden. Committee of the Regions. 2002. Conference on ‘The Open Method of Coordination (OMC), Improving European Governance? Summary and Conclusions’, Conference Proceedings, Brussels, 30 September–1 October. De la Porte, Caroline and Philippe Pochet. 2003. The participative dimension of the OMC. Paper presented at the conference "Opening the Open Method of Co-ordination", European University Institute, 4-5 July 2003, Florence. Gornitzka, Åse. 2006. The Open Method of Coordination as practice – A watershed in European education policy?, Working paper. Centre for European Studies, University of Oslo. Hudson, Christine. 2007. Governing the Governance of Education: the state strikes back? European Education Research Journal 6 (3): 266-282. Lange, Bettina in Nafsika Alexiadou. 2007. New Forms of European Union Governance in the Education Sector? A Preliminary Analysis of the Open Method of Coordination. European Educational Research Journal 6 (4): 321-335. Lawn, Martin in Bob Lingard. 2002. Constructing a European Policy Space in Educational Governance: the role of transnational policy actors. European Educational Research Journal 1 (2): 290-307. Radaelli, M. Claudio. 2004. Who learns what? Policy learning and the open method of coordination. Paper presented at the Conference: Implementing the Lisbon strategy »policy learning inside and outside the open method«, European Research Institute – University of Birmingham.
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