Children's Rights, Eastern Enlargement and the EU Human Rights Regime by Ingi Iusmen

Author:Ingi Iusmen [Iusmen, Ingi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: European, Political Science, World, Human Rights
ISBN: 9781526102324
Google: kW25DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18778989
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2014-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

5

Drivers of change, policy entrepreneurship and the institutionalization of children’s rights

The joining of the three separate streams (problems, policies, politics) … depends heavily on the appearance of the right entrepreneur at the right time.

(Kingdon, 1984: 213)

Introduction

The European Union’s (EU) application of human rights conditionality in relation to child protection in Romania had feedback effects on the EU’s own children’s rights provision. Yet, the empirical evidence supporting this claim raises crucial analytical questions about the mechanisms of feedback effects, the push-and-pull factors and the role of entrepreneurial actions undertaken by EU actors, in essence: what are the drivers of change? This chapter provides an analytical overview of the explanatory factors accounting for the feedback effects triggered by the Romanian children’s case. Two sets of factors are presented: structural and agency related. In terms of the contextual or structural conditions, the salience attached to human rights in the Eastern enlargement process sowed the seeds for broader propitious – political and institutional – conditions for addressing human rights matters more robustly inside the Union. Apart from these favourable circumstances, the availability of EU entrepreneurs, i.e. agency-related factors, to take advantage of these propitious opportunities made a substantial difference to the emergence of feedback effects. Kingdon’s (1984) model of multiple streams coupling is employed to explain the emergence of children’s rights as an issue on EU internal policy agenda. Both the EU’s propitious context and the entrepreneurship of EU actors provide insights into broader EU processes by demonstrating how the enlargement of the EU is intimately linked with the trajectory and scope of European integration by affecting irreversibly the normative principles and values of the EU, what the EU is and does. The feedback effects are analysed by employing a historical institutionalist lens (in EU external policy dimension) and processes of policy entrepreneurship and ‘EU-topianization’ (in EU internal policy dimension). The last section of this chapter demonstrates that children’s rights have become institutionalized at the EU level after 2006.

Drivers of change: context, conditions, entrepreneurs

The sections below provide the analytical narrative underpinning the feedback effects in relation to the EU internal policy sphere described in Chapter 4. With respect to these feedback effects, the main drivers of change involve contextual factors and the pro-active role played by policy entrepreneurs at the EU level. It is argued, therefore, that entrepreneurs always operate in a certain setting, one that can either facilitate or constrain their entrepreneurial initiatives. Eastern enlargement has created favourable conditions for the emergence of a more robust human rights agenda at the EU level. At the same time, specific factors pertaining to children’s rights and in line with Kingdon’s model of multiple streams coupling facilitated the emergence of entrepreneurial actions by EU actors which led to the establishment of children’s rights as an overarching EU policy issue.

EU context: favourable factors

There are broad contextual factors, along with specific conditions (discussed in the section on ‘Policy entrepreneurship’ below), that contributed to the emergence of feedback effects inside the Union. These broad conditions involve the salience attached

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