NEW YORK: When it comes to social housing innovation, Europeanisation is becoming a ‘ball and chain’ for domestic policy-makers. The EU has, gradually and subtly, created an ever more important layer of governance over how public services can be delivered, effectively straightjacketing the state.
The public sector reforms of the 1980s and 1990s have reduced the autonomy and discretion of government bureaucracies.
In a nutshell, the state was being hollowed out, as central and local governments lost functions, downwards, to other agencies and upwards, to the European Union. Once governments realized this, it was predicted, they would reverse these trends back to more traditional bureaucratic approaches.
But this reversal has not happened, nor is it likely to. Governments across the EU have signed up to an increasingly broad set of binding rules on how public services can be provided. Bar actually leaving the EU or renegotiating the Treaty of Lisbon, it is not obvious how they can disentangle themselves from these rules…