Bricolage or Entrepreneurship ?
US Center for Disease Control ( CDC ), being consequential in terms of training , surveillance , and research , areas in which the Charter group had demonstrated no ambition . The proposal enriched the primeval soup but never met a strong support within the policy community . As such it remained an idea “ on the shelf ”: the only member of the policy community to put efforts and time in the idea was Michel Tibayrenc , but the idea never involved efforts from the community in designing a specific plan nor bared a cost . It is interesting to note that this policy idea is a cased for policy diffusion and as such cannot be considered to present increasing returns without the policy community making efforts to translate the US model to the European context .
The proposal for an EU agency triggered important debates among the members of the policy network and received thorough criticism from supporters and members of the Charter group . The journal for medical practitioners The Lancet featured an unsigned editorial titled “ Not another European Institution ” ( Lancet 1998 ). The Editorial recalled the accomplishments of the Charter Group , in terms of trainings or surveillance . It was followed by a stream of back and forth open letters and articles dedicated to support one idea over the other one , in different public health journals ( see Butler 1998 ; Dove 1998 ; Giesecke and Weinberg 1998 ; MacLehose , McKee , and Weinberg 2002 ; Newton , Grimaud , and Weinberg , 1999 ; Reichhardt 1998 ; Tibayrenc 1998 ; 1999 ).
This debate explains how these two policy ideas survived the primeval soup . The Charter Group seems to have won the battle : as a matter of technical feasibility , the Charter group was a “ light structure ” designed for the exchange of information not the funding and hosting of research facilities that is why a “ bricks and mortar ” solution was not deemed necessary . In terms of value acceptability , this was a clash between the creation of a Europeanwide institution and the reluctance of national institutionalized experts to cede sovereignty over public health policy . More importantly , the debate revolved around how each idea had the potential to be used by policymakers . However , I will demonstrate later on that the idea of an agency had limited receptivity in the politics stream .
Beyond the criteria of survival , this analysis of the policy streams ought to assess the increasing returns of the two different ideas . The initiative of the Charter Group is the only one of the two to demonstrate a cost for the policy community and the policymakers and as such fulfill the criteria . This being demonstrated , the next part ought to investigate how the evolving ripeness of the politics stream .
The Ripeness of the Politics Stream
The European Commission had a long history with the Charter group . It supported them throughout the 1990s . In 1993 , the soon to be fathers of the Charter group put a proposal to the European Commission for a grant to draw up an inventory of all the international surveillance and training collaborations that were currently taking place in the EU , the grant was accepted ( Bartlett 1998 ). Then , a representative of the Commission ( DG V : Employment & Social Affairs )
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