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

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).