Introduction

In the third chapter, the focus was on the development of an ‘inside’ approach to the law–governance relationship. Inside theories treat governance as an intra-legal phenomenon, or as part of a process of decentring which has also altered our view of the nature and institutions of law. This shift was characterised through three headings – proceduralisation, experimentalism and reflexive law. All three approaches point to a common challenge to which European law has had to respond – the functional and territorial complexity of the European polity, and the regulatory environment within which methods like the OMC SPSI must live.

Together, these ‘inside’ approaches have produced major conceptual innovations. They may even have contributed towards overcoming what Neil Walker has described as the methodological nationalism of much of European legal scholarship. They have sought to evaluate law not from within a ‘given’ statist framework, but in light of the distinct features of the European polity. They have based their evaluation of methods like the OMC not on the mythical standards (criticised in the second chapter) of a ‘hard’, ‘determinate’ or ‘uniform’ legal order, but on the basis of structural limits already implicit within the EU’s legal system. In this manner, they have allowed inside approaches to provide a positive definition of the law–governance relationship, rather than one that solely posits governance in opposition to ‘traditional’ legal categories (whatever that may mean).