Between the Lines of the European Participative Governance Discourse
Résumé
From 1995 to 2000, academics and European Commission (EC) civil servants participated in a seminar organised by the EC and dedicated to the governance of the European Union. The main outcome of this seminar was the publication of the White Paper on European Governance in July 2001. This White Paper focuses on the concept of " good governance " and presents five corresponding principles: openness, participation, accountability, effectiveness and coherence. Here, participation benefits from a special status since it is considered as a prerequisite for fulfilling the four other principles. Based on a semantic analysis of the corresponding EC publications, we propose a detailed characterisation of the discursive regime of European participative governance. A specificity of this discourse lies in its almost exclusive uptake of participation as " procedural " , as opposed to a possible " substantial " participation. I will then expose the convergences and divergences between both discursive regimes of European participative governance and of neoliberalism. In particular, I will show that their main divergence concerns the status that the discourse of participative governance confers to both bureaucracy and techno-scientific expertise. Finally, in the EC participative governance discourse, the promoted participation is the procedural participation of scientific and technical experts, coming from either the European bureaucracy or the organised civil society, and not the participation of lay European citizens.
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