Unemployment Protection Reform in Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands, and the UK: Policy Learning through Open Coordination?

Minna van Gerven, Mieke Beckers

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterAcademicpeer-review

    16 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    Although the main driving forces behind welfare reform in today’s European welfare states remain predominantly national, such processes of reform no longer take place in ‘splendid isolation’. Not only have economic internationalization and European integration constrained national governments, but contemporary welfare states are also increasingly embedded in supranational efforts to coordinate their employment and social policies. During the 1990s, the seeds for such strategies grew out of the perception that structural problems of unemployment are shared concerns, and therefore call for supranational agenda setting. In the field of labour market policies, the OECD Jobs Strategy (1994) and the European Employment Strategy (1997) are among the most important procedures of benchmarking, systematic comparison, and recommendations. In short, this process of opening up to cross-national agenda setting has created a more complex setting in which policy learning comes not only from inside (in the form of ‘trial-and-error lesson drawing’), but also from outward-looking international benchmarking (Hemerijck 2005: 47).
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationChanging European Employment and Welfare Regimes
    Subtitle of host publicationThe Influence of the Open Method of Coordination on National Reforms
    EditorsMartin Heidenreich, Jonathan Zeitlin
    Place of PublicationLondon
    PublisherRoutledge
    Pages61-83
    ISBN (Electronic)978-0-203-87887-3
    ISBN (Print)978-0-415-48278-3
    Publication statusPublished - 2009

    Publication series

    NameRoutledge/EUI Studies in the Political Economy of the Welfare State
    PublisherRoutledge

    Keywords

    • n/a OA procedure

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