The EU

Lorna Ryan In a recent paper, ‘Governance of EU research policy: Charting forms of scientific democracy in the European Research Area’ (Science and Public Policy 2014), I explore, prompted by Alan Irwin’s work (2001), how the ‘scientific citizen’ is constructed within current policy and decision making processes’.  The paper is based on my efforts to […]

Two special reports published this month by the European Court of Auditors question the added value of the EU budget when channelled through fisheries and regional development programmes, to projects aiming to protect and improve aquaculture, and biodiversity more generally. ‘Each year the EU produces about 1,3 million tonnes of fish from aquaculture, and the sector has a turnover […]

How much would you trust EU institutions if you suspected that they were badly governed? Not too much, I guess. Then why is it that arguments around EU democratic legitimacy tend to focus on better results (output legitimacy) or improved citizen participation (intput legitimacy)? This is likely because reforms aimed at improving public administration do not actually pay […]

On 3 September 2014, Maria-Luisa Sanchez-Barrueco (Universidad de Deusto), Paul Stephenson (SciencesPo Paris/Maastricht University), Hartmut Aden (Berlin School of Economics and Law) and Jacques Sciberras (European Court of Auditors) presented four papers in their panel ‘Financial Accountability in the European Union: Building the Cathedral of EU Legitimacy?’ at the 44th UACES conference in Cork, Ireland.   While […]

As we enter the last 200 days of this current Parliament, it’s perhaps useful to spend a moment thinking about where the UK finds itself in relation to the EU. But this is a very reductive reading of the situation. Let’s start by considering UKIP, seeming standard-bearer that it is of the anti-EU movement. Carswell’s […]

UKIP, a political party whose polices are based on a profound fear of immigrants, has just had their first  MP elected by the people of Clacton, a town which is over 90% white British, with hardly any immigrants.  Yet in London – one of the world’s most diverse ethnic cities, where less than 50% are white British […]

While we wait to find out whether UKIP can secure their first elected MP today, I’d like to take a bit of a bigger view. This comes on the back of a couple of events in the past week that I attended on the future of the EU, one as speaker and one as audience member. A common theme […]

Chiara Carrozza I spent part of my morning browsing The Researchers’ Report 2014 developed in line with the key priority of ensuring the “free circulation of knowledge” in the European Research Area (ERA), and a relevant part of it focuses on the progresses made at both European and national level in removing or alleviating some […]

The next twelve months will be critical in shaping the European Union’s position on climate change, ahead of the all-important UN climate negotiations which start next November in Paris. But will the UK be a help or a hindrance to delivering ambitious action on climate change? At the UN Climate Summit in New York this […]

It’s conference session again and so a useful time to gauge where parties are at with their positions on the EU. Labour’s leadership largely avoided the issue, mainly because of the continuing pressure from various factions to press for a referendum on membership. Given Miliband’s anticipation (justified or not) that he will be in Number 10 in […]