European Policy Analysis Volume 2, Number 2, Winter 2016 | Page 60

Bricolage or Entrepreneurship ?
Bricolage , as an oblique way to formulate policy , will now guide our understanding of how different ideas were pieced together to create a solution that would go swiftly through the decisionmaking phase . The European Commission had two different policy ideas at hand . On the one hand , the network had strong , consolidated increasing returns and , on the other hand , the policymakers had been increasingly riper to the creation of a new agency .
The process tracing showed that the Commission was wary of the Communicable Disease Network created in 1999 and used it as the basis for the proposal “ The basic formula for cooperation amongst Member States and the Commission in the framework of Decision 2119 / 98 / EC is not being questioned ” ( European Commission 2003a ). This shows the Commission paying attention to spare the cost of exiting organizational choices set up previously . Nevertheless , it presents the agency idea as the core concept , while the agency idea is actually superimposed on the existing network .
The proposal did not retain key features of the suggested ECID such as financing and hosting research labs . The ECDC is not a European “ CDC ” based on the US model but a “ hub ” ( Greer and Matzke 2012 ), a center that coordinates a network , composed of different authorities in charge of epidemiological surveillance in the EU . It retains all the existing features ( including , for instance , the publication of Eurosurveillance ) and is still based on the coordination and “ synergies between the existing national centres for disease control ” ( European Commission 2003a ).
National information and expertise are still predominant in the functioning of the center , whereas for data exchange or for training purposes . The Commission pieced together a modest project “ a large European Centre is not needed ” ( European Commission 2003a ), which also prevents the most skeptical elements of the politics stream from opposing the proposal . The proposal also included the mention that the ECDC would be an agency without regulatory powers ( European Commission 2003a ), which echoed the concerns raised by two member states : the UK and Germany ( Council of the European Union 2004 ).
This shows that bricolage was a process of creating a European Agency while incorporating many elements of the epidemiological network . By bricolage , the European Commission avoided the costs of exiting the initiative in which time and money had been invested while taking into account the changed ripeness of policymakers vis-à-vis the creation of agency .
Bricolage is thus seminal in understanding why a proposal is swiftly adopted , not the crisis itself . The Commission ’ s proposal required only one reading facilitated by a conciliation meeting that was set up early on in the process , a practice that is relatively unusual in the inter-institutional bargaining at the EU level . Rather than a beacon of the consensual culture of decisionmaking in Brussels , the decision-making process was the result of the European Commission formulating a policy solution that “ fit ”, which led to speeding-up policy formulation and decision-making .
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