Seeing the Value of EU Law

I was very proud to present my Subsidiarity Scoreboard work at the ECR Group Study Week in Krakow, Poland.

I was inspired by the people I met, especially those MEPs who are so passionate about their work and their dedicated policy advisers. I’m fascinated by the tension between ideological belief and evidence, claim and fact and this is the world they wrestle with daily.

My talk was about Seeing the Subsidiarity Gap; the idea of a scoreboard for making the gap between the predicted and actual added value of EU law more visible. Publishing this Scoreboard could influence the reform of lower value EU laws and even the legislative process itself. Watch the talk below.

I was however struck by another kind of gap; the gap between my own mental models and those immersed in EU law, economics and politics. And yet, in spite of this difference in mindsets and worldviews, how Systems Thinking can be a unifying approach however challenging the domain and context.

The study, sponsored by the New Direction Foundation for European Reform, is described in a bit more detail in the case study.