Public Administrators in the Europeanization of Risk Governance – Co-Creation Amidst the Political Heterarchy

This article depicts a dialectic relationship between the creative conduct of public administrators on the one hand, and the institutional complexity of their political surrounding, on the other. An ethnographic study of the collaborative policy design of the Dutch predecessor of REACH (‘Regulation for Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals’), so-called SOMS (Dutch: Strategy dealing with substances), shows how risk governance policies are created, or even co-created against the backdrop of Europeanization. This creativity is depicted and operationalized through the notions of articulation work (Strauss, 1988), mobility work (Bardram and Bossen, 2005) and mutual monitoring (Heath and Luff, 1992). Dutch public administrators engaged heavily in European negotiations, thus operating amidst contradictory hierarchies and juggling with several evaluative criteria. Eventually, in 2007, this trajectory led to what some call the European Commission’s most complex bill (Rettman, 2007). The Europeanization of risk governance is characterized as a process in which hierarchies are primarily not steepened or overcome, but rather multiplied and recombined into contradictory value systems and conflictual policy constellations. The paper therefore argues that Europeanization creates a political heterarchy, in which the creativity of policy-makers plays a pivotal, but paradoxical role.