The Lisbon Strategy and Sustainable Development Strategies Across Europe: How Different Governance Arrangements Shape the European Coherence of Policy Documents

Abstract

The present paper compares two major political strategies that are being pursued across the EU, i.e. the Lisbon Strategy and sustainable development (SD) strategies. It first highlights their complementary character in implementing the societal guiding model known as SD, and it compares their different histories and governance arrangements. While the Lisbon Strategy is a genuinely European response to global pressures that employs the open method of coordination (OMC), guidance for SD strategies came from the international level, and OMC emerged only cautiously and temporarily after the renewal of the EU SD strategy in 2006. Based on an empirical stocktaking of policy objectives and indicators, the paper then assesses how the different supra-national governance arrangements shape the coherence of the respective national strategies across Europe. It shows that, so far, OMC was not able to facilitate a ‘standardised format’ of Lisbon Strategies across Europe as envisaged by the European Commission; to the contrary: OMC entailed only slightly more coherent National Reform Programmes than international guidance did in the SD context.