. The Promise and Failure of Transatlantic Regulatory Cooperation through Networks

Abstract

This chapter examines the prospects and expectations of bilateral regulatory cooperation, and explains the failure of bilateral cooperation to produce any significant formal or informal agreements or evidence of genuine deliberation between the US and EU regulators, other than scientists regarding risk-assessment practices. The chapter is organized in five parts. The first part reviews and extends the literature on international governance through ‘transgovernmental networks’ of national officials, while the second part examines the prospects for deliberation in such networks. The third section briefly examines evidence from transatlantic regulatory cooperation across a broad range of issue-areas such as competition policy, data protection, financial services, and mutual recognition agreements, noting the considerable variation in successful cooperation across these fields. The fourth section turns specifically to risk regulation. Finally, the fifth section reviews the abortive attempt to build systematic transgovernmental networks for biotech regulation between the US and the EU in the 1990s. It argues that this failure demonstrates the difficulty and fragility of deliberation in international politics, and sets the stage for the more extensive and marginally more successful efforts to cooperate in multilateral regimes.