Struggling with Europe : how initiators of horizontal forms of governance respond to EU formal rules

More and more public actors work together or rely on citizens and private actors to provide for public services. These forms of governance are often referred to as horizontal forms of governance. This study focuses on the difficult relationship between horizontal forms of governance and existing EU formal rules. The study shows that national actors are often strongly committed to the governance initiatives and confident of the possibility to introduce them within the EU formal setting. This mobilises initiators of horizontal forms of governance to not directly conform to EU formal rules. Instead a number of active responses is pursued to introduce the horizontal forms of governance. As a result of increasing enforcement pressures by the European Commission, initiators start to realise that their active responses will not be successful and that continuing these will be futile. They start to realise that they must adopt a more pragmatic (and partly conforming) stance.