The impossible mission of the Open Method of Coordination in education: From complexity to consensus.
(2020) European Conference on Educational Research — Location: Glasgow (annulé) (24.August.2020)
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- One of the most radical assertions made by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann was that of late modern society’s lack of self-control (Luhmann, 1990). Indeed, from the perspective of systems theory governing modern society is at once expected and impossible. The history of the political system must be understood as a series of attempts to achieve a task that cannot be achieved: that of actually governing or controlling modern society. The constitutional Nation State and the separation between legislative, executive and judicial powers has been the most conventional modern attempt by the political system to control society. In late modernity, the political system added yet another attempt to control modernity’s own lack of control: that of “governance” instruments, sometimes alluded to under the terms “governing without government” (Rhodes, 1996). Several authors have linked this type of ambiguity to the “Governance Turn” (Armstrong, 2016; Kjaer, 2010), the “Comparative Turn” (Grek, 2009, 2010) or the “Knowledge Turn” (Fenwick et al., 2014; Freeman & Mangez, 2013; Normand & Derouet, 2016). The main topic of interest of this paper is the involvement of the European Union in the sector of education through the Open Method of Coordination. The attempt of the EU to govern education is fostered and legitimised by the observation of society’s future as full of risks and uncertainties exceeding by far national territories – unemployment, terrorism, transformation of the labour market, etc. These observations, apparent in the “Lisbon Dramaturgy” (Laffan & Shaw, 2005), far from acting as an obstacle to the European involvement in education, operate instead as resources legitimating further political action at EU level. This involvement, however, does not take the conventional form of government. Instead, at a transnational level, the political system partly takes the form of governance processes, such as the OMC. The OMC is often defined by its informality (Alexiadou, 2007, 2014; Kjaer, 2010; Trubek & Trubek, 2005; Wallace et al., 2006) compared to traditional political mechanisms such as the Ordinary-Legislative-Procedure. Attempts to characterise these informal mechanisms range from the “lack of pre-given sets of rules” (Hajer, 2006) to “a greater inclusion of non-governmental actors in policy processes” (Peters, 2007). Inspired by but not limiting ourselves to these definitions, we intend to complete the analysis of informal governance mechanisms with the example of the Education and Training 2020 Working Groups, constitutive of the OMC in education. Informality, we suggest, is by no means a lack of form but rather a redefinition of political processes in a context of relative lack of formal power. Informal governance redefines the ways politics attempt to steer society, not by the deliberation, voting and implementation of legislative rules, but rather by facilitating learning processes, sharing of best practices and the tentative construction of shared cognitive frameworks at European level. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to provide a description and an analysis of the ET2020 Working Groups as novel ways through which the political system attempts to govern education. Research questions - How do the WG attempt to reach a consensus through the production of a coherent output, given the diversity of backgrounds and expectations among the WG members? - What is the influence of their initial mandate in the production of their output? How do the WG achieve to fulfil their two-fold mission, on one side to complete the objectives pre-defined by the mandates, and on the other side to foster the feeling of agreement and ownership of the WG members towards the output?
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Gain, V., & Mangez, E. (2020). The impossible mission of the Open Method of Coordination in education: From complexity to consensus. European Conference on Educational Research, Glasgow (annulé). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/121649