Explaining different usages of policy monitoring in the EU

Abstract

The EU increasingly relies on forms of policy monitoring. While functioning policy monitoring remains the ‘critical underlying assumption’ of many approaches such as (performance) auditing, the European Semester or sector specific approaches such as the Energy Union, it remains underexplored. Monitoring has been portrayed as a technical exercise, but we contend that it may be used in different ways. To explain under what conditions different usages are pursued, this article proposes a new typology to explain different usages of policy monitoring, based on combinations of the level of (dis)agreement on policy goals and instruments, and (un)certainty about the effectiveness and the implementation of the policy instruments. The paper then presents a plausibility probe of our typology in two policy areas: agriculture and climate change/energy. We find that many, but not all, expectations of our model bear out; future research should explore additional substantial policy areas and the impact available resources have on the quality of monitoring.