Governance and Institutionalist Approaches to the Study of the European Union

This chapter has two objectives. First, it provides an overview of the ‘governance turn’ in the study of European integration; and second, more briefly, it looks at the way in which the new institutionalism has been used in the academic literature on the European Union (EU). Opening with a discussion of the reasons why governance as a concept and as a practice has become so prevalent in Europe, the chapter considers how the governance approach has evolved, focusing on ‘multilevel governance’ and the ‘regulatory state’. The chapter then introduces some of the important normative debates to which the ‘governance turn’ has given rise, before considering the relevance of the governance approach in the current phase of European integration. Finally, the chapter considers a second approach to studying European integration, the new institutionalism. This section discusses what the new institutionalism is, and provides some examples of how it has been used by scholars of European integration.