Europeanization as organizational learning: When French ENGOs play the EU multilevel policy game

Abstract

This article adopts an organization-centered and pragmatist approach in order to analyze Europeanization as a learning process in the field of public policy. This approach opposes the established view, which understands national ENGOs’ (environmental non-governmental organizations’) activism as a process that is simply responsive to European opportunities according to their resources and values/preferences. The concept of organizational learning re-establishes the organization as the unit of analysis and as an explanatory factor of the strategies related to the European Union (EU) arena. Defined as a ‘learning-by-doing’ process, organizational learning consists of discovering and exploiting the EU multilevel game, while mobilizing internal resources for this purpose. The proposed analytical framework enriches the empirical discussion of the way in which French ENGOs deal with the uncertainty of multilevel policymaking, while discussing the strategic dimension of their EU activism.