Summary: I was commissioned in 1994 by the European Commission to lead a project that would produce distance learning materials on cancer education for post-basic nurses across the European Union. In facilitating the process with a group representing eleven countries I adopted an approach based on democracy, participation and experiential learning. The process was researched using grounded theory and aimed to discover the conditions required for collaborative working within the EU and with applications to other settings. The early chapters reflect both the concerns for the project and the interrelated but separate issues of research method and methodology. Regarding the former the original aims and commitments are set against the constraints imposed by funding and budgeting issues, translation difficulties and the challenges presented by dissemination. The context in which the research arose is given within a brief history of the project, set against the background in which this and similar projects were being funded by the Commission during the early 1990s. A review of the technical literature focuses on the Commission's own evaluations of public health projects in the first two action phases 1990 - 2000 and the subsequent adaptations to funding criteria from lessons learned. The embeddedness of the research within the project implementation creates complexities that are addressed first by a number of narratives that seek to elucidate antecedents. Brief auto/biographies underpin and provide a rationale for the development of the methodology that informed the implementation of the project. Narratives provide the platform for the ensuing exploration of foreshadowed problems that led to theoretical sensitivity. The case is made for the adoption of grounded theory methodology, acknowledging the procedural as well as epistemological challenges this poses. Later chapters track the development of the emerging theory by providing thick description about the data, its collection and analysis, as the techniques progress from open coding to explicit theory formation. Early themes deriving from theoretical sensitivity are re-assessed and some original concepts earn their way into the theory whilst others are rejected or transformed. The formal expression of the necessary conditions for collaborative project working in the EU is synthesised in chapter 12 in which the proposition is made for a theory of Facilitative Leadership. The case is made for a substantive theory that approaches multi area formality through its wider applicability across similar settings. The dissonance created for the social scientist in choosing to adopt the original model of grounded theory in its entirety is pervasive throughout the thesis. This theme is addressed explicitly in the closing chapter, in which the major elements of both the project and the research are re-assessed.

This research project examines the role of student services in universities in Central and Eastern Europe at a time of rapid transformation of the higher education sector, following from the collapse of the socialist period in 1989 and the implementation of the Bologna process after 1999. Conducted in the period 2004- 2006, the research process aimed to identify the major factors of institutional change, and to what extent are students, and services for students, considered a driving force for organisational restructuring. Based upon a comparative qualitative study of four public universities in Hungary, Romania, Croatia and Serbia, this project found ample evidence of institutional change and introspection, innovation, achievement, as well as awareness and critical analysis of weaknesses. However, the main expectation to find students as active agents in institutional change and in the improvement of the old and the provision of new services for students was not supported by the findings in this study. Although the four universities in this project share the characteristics of an allencompassing change process, students, and services for students, still play a marginal part in determining institutional priorities and in influencing the service provision and culture. Having anticipated the lack of awareness of the role of student services in organisational management, this project examines the reasons for this from a historical perspective, using a comparative approach to development trends in the United States, continental Europe, and Central and Eastern Europe. It further suggests a model of integrated student services, based upon the actual experience of the Central European University, but defined and analysed against the context of the region. This research project coincides with a growing awareness in public policy debates in continental Europe of the importance of institutional student support services. As the first study of institutional practices with regard to student services in Central and Eastern Europe, it anticipates the reform in this area and the integration of student services as part of the university core.

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The European Parliament (EP) has evolved into a powerful legislative actor over the past 40 years. In order to exercise its hard won legislative competencies in an efficient and effective manner the EP has developed an extensive and influential committee system. The Treaty of Lisbon (ToL) recognised its equal status as co-legislator with the Council of the EU and introduced the Ordinary Legislative Procedure (OLP) as the default EU legislative procedure. Despite the fact that after the introduction of the OLP all EP committees formally operate under the same legal procedure, disparities remain in the levels of influence that each committee commands. This state of affairs demonstrates that if we are to understand what drives committee influence we need to explore the informal sources of influence that committees draw on in addition to the formal rules. This project addresses the lack of understanding of how the committees establish legislative influence by identifying and testing the different resources which committees may be utilising to establish their influence. The thesis puts forward four hypotheses concerning the factors that can account for how committees establish influence. These are developed and tested within three case studies. The case studies comprise the highly influential committees on, firstly, the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety Committee, secondly, the Budget Committee and, thirdly, the International Trade Committee. The research project adopts a qualitative approach to complement and create a different perspective from the quantitative studies which dominate the field. It draws on extensive primary material from thirty semi-structured interviews held with MEPs, advisers, EP staff and party officials active in the 7th legislative term (2009-2014). A number of the current conventions concerning the way in which expertise, partisan dynamics, and policy outputs affect how committees establish legislative influence are challenged and new insights regarding their relative importance are offered. Overall, these original findings, contained within this dissertation, have highly significant implications, not only with regard to the committee system of the EP but, also, for the wider field of legislative politics.

This thesis uses cyber security, an important topic in today's world, as a vector for analysis in order to contribute to a better understanding of the European Union (EU)’s policy-making processes. Although EU policy has received extensive scholarly attention, cyber security policy is under-researched, a gap in current literature this thesis addresses. The goal of the thesis is to understand why the Union adopted and maintained a socio-economic approach to cyber security when other actors added military and defence considerations. The thesis employs an historical institutionalist (HI) framework to examine the long-term institutional and ideational influences underpinning policy development in this area between 1985 and 2013. This was achieved using a longitudinal narrative inquiry employing an original, conceptual content analysis technique developed to gather data from both relevant EU acquis communautaire and over 30 interviews. There were three main findings resulting from this analysis, two empirical and one theoretical. The first empirical finding was that the EU’s competences established an institutional framework – a set of rules and procedures – for policy development in this sector. By restricting the EU’s capacity to engage in military or national security-oriented issues, its competences required it to respond to emerging security matters from a socio-economic perspective. The second empirical finding was that there exists a specific discourse underpinning EU cyber security policy. That discourse is predicated upon a set of five ideational elements which influenced policy continuously between 1985 and 2013. These five elements are: maximising the economic benefits of cyberspace; protecting fundamental rights; tackling cyber-crime; promoting trust in digital systems and achieving these goals through facilitating actor co-operation. Throughout the thesis the argument is made that the EU adopted and maintained its socio-economic policy as a result of an interaction between this ideational discourse and the institutional framework provided by competences. This interaction created a linear, but not deterministic path of policy development from which the EU did not deviate. The third, theoretical, finding relates to the HI mechanisms of path dependency and punctuated equilibrium. The EU’s policy discourse was exposed to major stresses after 2007 which, according to punctuated equilibrium, should have caused policy change. Instead, those stresses entrenched the Union’s discourse. This demonstrates an explanatory flexibility not normally associated with punctuated equilibrium. The findings of the thesis have implications for policy practitioners by providing a way to identify underlying ideational dynamics in policy development. Due to a combination of empirical and conceptual findings, the thesis provides a potential basis for future research in EU policy development and HI analyses.

In today's fast evolving Central and Eastern Europe, economic perspectives, especially European Union perspectives are indispensable to the success of the transformation process initiated in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Based on our research output, this thesis offers many such perspectives that can help understand the logic of the transformation and the subsequent business done by national and international enterprises. We have interwoven many information-rich threads of transformation principles with banking, dynamic cultural factors and tax policy that influence these new market-economy countries. We observe the role and the process of financial institutions and also consider the impact that information technology exerts on these economies and thus concluding that the significance of culture development and the betterment of the population are the central driving force within a wider Europe. This thesis offers fundamental notions that influence cross-cultural interactions also, providing a concrete basis for understanding the influence of Central and Eastern European countries on the European Union's political choices and vice versa. We examine the transformation and its significance, paradoxes and the interplay of economic approaches and entrepreneurship. In the specific, we look at how the European Union policy towards these countries evolved, suggesting that a trend towards a Bruxelles Consensus is the specific outcome of the European Union's attitudes towards Central and Eastern Europe. An extended evaluation of the consequences for all of us will also emerge as our approach has been that to present all these aspects in a way that inspire understanding of basic governing issues and expectations concerning the future on Central and Eastern Europe in the ever-growing European Union.

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This thesis explores EU-Brazil relations and answers the question of why these two actors have failed to use the bilateral level of their cooperation as a platform to enhance their coordination in multilateral arenas. The thesis develops a framework to explain the linkage between levels of cooperation within a particular bilateral relationship that focuses on both agents and issues. The argument of “level-linkage” is empirically tested in three case-studies: climate change, trade, and human rights. The thesis finds that the greater the openness of a regime to influences from other levels of cooperation, the more likely level-linkage is to occur. However, level-linkage is restricted to where the approaches of the two partners towards multilateralism are compatible. Preferences for partners were also not the main constraint to the promotion of an EU-Brazil strategic partnership in multilateral arenas. Instead, as this thesis reveals, the degree of coordination in national foreign policy-making institutions is the key determinant of level-linkage. These findings support the argument that the dynamics between agents and the specificities of issues do matter in explaining the relation between bilateral and multilateral levels of cooperation. In this light, this thesis contributes to the analysis of bilateral relationships within a multi-level structure, ultimately advancing academic research in international cooperation. It also contributes to the literature on foreign policy analysis and to an emerging body of scholarship in EU-Brazil relations.

This thesis investigates the economic culture that fostered the constitutional history and political cosmology of late medieval and early modern Genoa. Genoese economic actors are here studied through their diversified trades and businesses, as they moved from the shores of the Black Sea into the Atlantic. Genoa’s late medieval economic expansion is described through several case studies and briefly compared to the state-run military expansion of Venice’s empire. Genoese colonial history is found to be both peculiar and relevant, as entrepreneurial techniques, institutions and attitudes later transferred to the Atlantic first originated in the private networks built by Ligurian businessmen in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The adaptability and entrepreneurial skills that allowed Genoese merchants and bankers, captains and businessmen, tax collectors and clergymen to enter the Spanish Atlantic in the sixteenth century are linked to the medieval history of the Genoese commune, to the specific idea of libertà progressively defined and protected by its fluid elite, and to the development of Hispanic-Genoese diplomatic and financial relations. Through the study of diverse documents in Italian, Genoese dialect, Venetian dialect, Spanish, Latin, and English, Genoa’s civic ideology and institutions are revealed to be intertwined with Genoese entrepreneurs’ simultaneity of careers, cosmopolitan self-perception, and mimetic imperialism. The thesis closes with a survey of the Genoese economic activities in Spain’s American kingdoms, whose most significant result is the illustration of Genoa’s multifaceted roles in the building of the Hapsburg Atlantic. This work thus constitutes the first chronologically and thematically broad attempt to explain the prolonged Genoese presence on the stage of intercontinental commerce as well as the existence of a modern Ligurian Atlantic.

The aim of EU Regional Policy is to intervene effectively in regions that “lag behind” in economic terms and to finance development programmes through the allocation of Structural Funds which operate in accordance with the principles of subsidiarity, additionality and partnership. This policy should allow regions to converge with EU averages in terms of income and employment. Italy and Spain provide very good examples within the EU as a whole, of significant economic disparities between regions that still appear to be present. We argue and provide substantial evidence of the fact that the persistence of such disparities is mainly due to inefficient administrative and institutional capacity at the regional level. Although some regions have brought themselves towards the average, in Italy and Spain, there is evidence that certain administrative, institutional and implementation problems have tended to appear, hampering the opportunities of regions to converge in the required way. Because of this, regional economic convergence and thereby socio-economic cohesion are still beyond reach. Two decades after the 1988 Reform of the Structural Funds, EU Regional Policy has only partially succeeded in reducing regional economic divergence within Italy and Spain, where regional economic inequalities still exist. Although we demonstrate that some regions have been able to move forward in the requisite way, it is questionable whether all of the support for these regions can actually be eliminated completely in the near future with the challenges that the EU faces, particularly in relation to the latest round of Enlargement.