Axe IV Analyse des politiques publiques

The Public Policy Analysis research concentration, newly created November 2008, will concentrate its work on contributing to the renewal and expansion of a wider ‘Europeanisation’ research agenda, concerned to understand the complex dynamics of policy at the national and European levels in complex systems of multi-level governance. As such, though part of the research undertaken will focus on the impacts of European Union policies at the national level (the ‘ downloading’ of policy), the work of the group will also be concerned more widely to understand the various forms of policy ‘dialogues’ facilitated by emerging structures of governance – focusing on both the conditions shaping the ‘ uploading ’ of policy from the national to the European level and the variable uses made of European referents within national political arenas. Attention will further be focused on the dynamics of transnational policy transfer , viewing Europeanisation in terms of the informal diffusion of norms and the creation of structures conducive to ‘policy learning’ in the absence of formal (legal) constraint.

The group will be particularly concerned to stimulate innovative methodological cross-fertilisations across differing disciplinary approaches and national academic traditions, seeking in the first instance to draw together the insights of institutionalist and sociological literatures as a means to develop a more strongly actor-centred problematic of Europeanisation processes. In tandem with the work of the ‘Comparative Governance’ research concentration, the PPA group will also be concerned to develop ‘extra-European’ comparative research (particularly as regards the wider set of post-industrial societies), as a means to situate both the specificities and the limits of European experience relative to more general processes of globalisation.

• The Bologna Process and the Domestic Determinants of Higher Education Reform
• Discourses of Multiculturalism and the Framing of National Immigration Policies
• National Experiences of Multlingualism and the (Re-)Conceptualisation of EU Language Policies