Managing European Policy at Home: Analysing Network Adaptation within the Core Executive

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse the changing nature of European policy making within national core executives. Using the Irish core executive as a case study, it sets out to map the process through which national EU policy is coordinated at the very heart of government, and to evaluate and explain the nature of adaptation over the past decade. The article is critical of traditional historical institutionalist accounts of domestic change that tend to downplay the nature and significance of adaptation to EU membership. Instead the study employs a distinctive strategic-relational network framework which aims to ‘add value’ to existing accounts in three main ways: first, by analysing shifting patterns of power dependency within the EU policy network; second, by exploring the way in which strategic actors interpret and shape the nature of change; and third, by offering a critical evaluation of the impact of adaptation. In this way the framework attempts to capture the fluidity, dynamism and wider significance of domestic change.