Assessing Horizontal and Vertical Coordination

Abstract

The European Union (EU) is notoriously complicated, and so the broad title of this book matches the authors’ ambitious undertaking: mapping and assessing the coordination of EU policy across layers of governance, across member states, across sectors, and across the policy process. Th eir aim is to understand better how the EU should manage policies that must be coordinated both hierarchically (or vertically) and horizontally. As globalization increases and societies become more interconnected, changes in one area of regulation have ramifi cations for other areas of regulation. Further, more and more policy makers are realizing that many policy problems simply cannot be dealt with by single departments or member states working alone. Jordan and Schout provide a framework to assess the capacity of the EU to accomplish this type of complex coordination, and they apply that framework to one large empirical case, that of environmental policy integration (EPI).