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hello everyone and welcome to today's episode of the globe webinar series on the future of global governance i am carrie autoburn and i will be moderating today's discussion today we are joined by professor david cohen to discuss his new book business lobbying in the european union published this year by oxford university press and co-authored with alexander quesadis and matia bononi david cohen is professor of public policy at the department of political science and founding director of the global governance institute at the university college london in addition to the book that is the subject of today's webinar his publications include the handbook on business and government by oxford in 2010 and lobbying in the eu also by oxford in 2009 and he's published extensively in leading journals such as the american review of public administration journal of european public policy journal of public policy and administration and european journal of political research also joining us today as discussion is professor wayne grant wynne grant is professor of politics in the department of politics and international studies at the university of warwick he has previously served as both chair and president of the political studies association he has written extensively on government business relations pressure groups and economic and industrial policy comparative public policy and in particular environmental policy agricultural policy and the political economy of football in 2010 he was awarded with the diamond jubilee lifetime achievement award of political studies association of the uk we will begin today's webinar with a presentation by david of about 25 minutes then we'll start off the discussion by offering some reflections and asking a few questions and david will have an opportunity to respond then we'll turn to questions from you the audience feel free to send questions to me throughout the webinar by using the webinar chat box function at the side of the webinar window i will collect your questions to share with the speakers following the presentations before we begin just a few words about the globe project funded by the european commission's horizon 2020 program globe seeks to understand the constraints and opportunities for the european union in promoting its interests and values through global governance with specific attention to four key areas trade and development security and migration climate change and global finance the three and a half year project aims to identify the major roadblocks to effective and coherent global governance by multiple stakeholders in a multi-polar world as well as to look ahead to 2030 and to 2050 in order to equip policy makers for the tools they will need to deal with future challenges on behalf of the globe project i would like to thank david and wynn for joining us today and now it is my great pleasure to give the floor to david okay well thank you very much for the for the kind words and uh thank you very much for inviting me to to talk uh as part of this globe project which i'm also involved in looking at at business and the environment or environmental policy so perhaps in a year's time i'll be able to join this webinar again with a with a new book on on business and the environment but um today's book is on business lobbying in the eu um that i wrote with alexander and matteo and i'd like to thank both of them they're not here today but without their their important inputs this book would would never have come to completion um so this book is a book that's been emerging developing evolving over a long period of time over almost 30 years um i've been looking and surveying big business and how they lobbied in the eu every 10 years for for the last 30 years in addition to that i've been studying and looking at how business and the institutions interact with each other um drawing down on the transparency register and on consultation documents probably for the last some 20 years and then in the last five to ten years um as part of a large british british academy grant i've been looking at the organization of government affairs offices and revolving revolving doors in brussels and so this book in a way tries to bring together this this body of work that i've that i've been exploring for for for much of my career and i've tried to to try and create some order looking at initially the macro environment in which business and government has evolved so the first question is how has business lobbying preferences changed over the last 30 years what what has been the changing logic of action in light of institutional changes in terms of structural changes in terms of the market in terms of increasing regulatory delegation to the eu in terms of changes in treaties and the changing power of the european institutions over over a 30-year period and then to look at the knock-on effect of how the type of person that's been involved in business and government has changed in response to the demands from those institutions so the initial part of the book is a sort of macro study of change and the forces for change on business political action in brussels the middle section of the book is the maiso section which is trying to look at who and where do interests mobilize um it's looking at the supply and the demand side so basically what interest groups and particularly firms supply and what institutions the european parliament and european commission demand and this is just trying to get at the density of the population and the diversity of types of interest groups across the institutions across the policy issues are and along the policy cycle so does policy make a difference does the institution make a difference where we are in the policy cycle does that make a difference in terms of who is at the table trying to to influence the policy process and then as i've said already to try and explore that changing relationship in terms of how companies organize themselves particularly government affairs in brussels who's staffing it the size of the government offices and the resources that they bring to bear on the government political story in brussels okay so a little bit of context lobbying is big business in brussels um it's a billion dollar european euro business it's probably second in terms of scale to washington in terms of the number of people and the amount of money being spent in terms of the number of interest groups the transparency register has over 12 000 interest groups registered are currently um to to lobby and over half of those interest groups are what would be called in-house in-house groups that's basically business groups businesses trade associations and so forth so if you look at figure one of that twelve thousand interest groups um fifty percent are on the red the red on on the on the figure are basically business business groups mobilizing uh of those 12 000 um 12 000 groups there's about three to four individuals per organization so in total numbers of lobbyists you know the figure we all hear 30 to 40 000 isn't hard to believe in terms of people lobbying and to put that in context if you think the european commission and the european parliament in terms of active policymakers is probably only comparable in numbers some 40 000 individuals there's almost a one for one policy makers or lobbyists which creates quite a strong resource dependency the european institution with the institutions which are very small really do require our interest groups to make policy and so it encourages and we'll talk about this as i go through it encourages the participation of interest groups in consultation um acro across the policy cycle so one of the things we were interested to explore was is business government the elite pluralism that people talk about including myself if you look at the hard figures of figure one fifty percent are business interests of some form so your initial thinking if you just looked at total figures would be yes it's an elite pluralism where business uh has a has a huge comparative advantage in numbers but one of the things this book tries to explore it tries to disaggregate this and to say is there variation in terms of activity between the commission and the style of activity at the european parliament do we see variation in and style of activity are along different in different policy areas and would we see different mobilization rates of interest groups depending on where you are on the policy cycle and so that's something i hope that will come through as as we as i talk and certainly comes through in the book just to disaggregate the 51 of business interests if you look at figure 2 you're getting the breakdown there you can see about 15 percent to trade unions 40 41 percent of trade and business associations and 39 of that of that number are our companies and company groups and company business coalitions and so direct action is uh is increasing and is an important part of the political game in brussels when i first started studying business and government way back in 1990 there were about 50 companies that probably had government affairs offices in brussels and most of those were the usual suspects that were part of the european uh uh large european trade associations and were the large european conglomerates as i started to study this over the 90s and 2000s some 300 some 350 companies started to have government affairs offices and there's probably about 750 companies that would declare some form of european office or capacity now and a large number more that would lobby on an occasional basis on european issues and so direct lobbying of brussels have increased so this is basically how companies have evolved in terms of that direct lobbying this is what companies do this graph was asking every 10 years and we asked them in 94 what they did in 84 as well 2005 and 2015. we asked companies how they allocated political resources both time money and expertise to a number of european and national institutions so european federations what used to be unisa but you know it's business europe the european commission your local mp the european parliament committees professional lobbyists your national governments and your national ministries for example um and what's become clear over this time is this general trend as i've said already towards direct lobbying and direct political action an increase from if you look at the european federations onwards an increase of political activity up for the european institution to influence on policy showing the delegation of authority the increasing regulations that were coming out of brussels we saw the increase which doesn't show in this graph as i said some 50 to 750 companies with european political activity some 300 companies 350 with european affairs offices and dedicated teams um we've seen a change in the type of people from being eu perhaps eu officials or national national civil servants who end up in these government affairs offices in the early days to professional in-house government affairs teams that have come through the company and i will return to that and so we've seen this increased activity primarily focused at the european commission where there's where the primary locus of regulation sits where the right of initiative sits and when we surveyed and interviewed a large number of these government affairs companies where many of them said about sixty percent of regulation is defined if you can get in at the beginning in the early consultations they call it the 60 rule many people you know it doesn't change as dramatically as it moves along the policy cycle as being involved at the beginning of the political story europe dealing with the european commission in in many ways can be seen like dealing with an agency when we talk to companies companies said it was very much based on technical expertise it was based on credibility and exchange of their information and it this took time and evolved uh through a sort of reputational game the commission officials were in place for a long time you don't see the same turnover as you would in the us or national administrations with change of government these people are career civil servants who believe in the european project and so therefore your reputation and your credibility was important and your currency unlike in the us which is campaign contributions and money was very much more about the credibility to deliver quality information on the other side of the equation the european commission and other agencies and bodies need input and output legitimacy they need to have input legitimacy in that insofar as they've seen to have a wide consultation to talk to all the interested parties to be seen to be credible in in collecting information and they need output legitimacy in as far as policy-making is only as good as being able to implement it and deliver it so having good credible policy that can actually they can actually make happen and so you talk to different actors and i will come back to that depending on which type of legitimacy you want end users firms are good examples of people who understand the technical widgets they understand the problems of delivery and therefore help with output legitimacy which often on regulatory issues is incredibly important over time the commission built networks um it improved the consultation process and introduced the transparency register and codes of conduct for political activity and as of january just after the book was published the transparency register has become mandatory as well uh rather than a voluntary process so in terms of in terms of governance of regulation the commission has tried to put in at least mechanisms to have some oversight about who talks when they talk and how much they talk um okay the second thing that's very clear from this graph if you look at the emp and ep is the rise of the european parliament when i first started these surveys back in the early in the early 90s it was very interesting how unimportant the european parliament was in terms of political activity for four companies but with the introduction of post-maastricht and amsterdam and we start to see the important rise of tri-logs and co-decision and the increasing use of first readings at committees as opposed to going to binary the parliament has become an important co-legislative actor and has become part of the technocratic policy making process and particularly rap auteurs and that's why you see the rise of emps um particularly rap alters are an important locus of political activity of companies or actually all all lobbyists in in trying to influence the policy process the interesting thing is consultancies and lobbying companies they're not as important in resource terms they're very useful for scouting they're very useful if the government affairs office is overloaded with regulatory activity but they're not seen as the primary way of interfacing and as an interlocutor with the commission because they're secondary actors they're not they're not they're working for you they're not building your reputation within that policy process and so i think one of the important things to take away from today's talk is the importance of reputation the other thing that's interesting in this data is the european federations and how they've risen over over the 20 30 years when i first did this study people used to talk about the lowest common denominator the slow reactive times of the european federations but over time they've restructured themselves they've reorganized their membership to allow large corporations to participate they've expanded in numbers and then so doing disaggregated so you have more clearly defined policy goals you have incumbents and new entrants for example so the membership structures are different um and they've increasingly often helped companies when seeking to influence and lobby directly so they help create those credentials as credibility lines that reputation as a good european in the policy process for companies to operate as direct actors as well as collective actors so i think that's an interesting observation too to take away as well that the the rebirth of the european collective action over over 20 30 years in brussels as companies and the associations have learned to work together uh in a more efficient and effective way with the european community i institutions the other thing really to take away from this graph is obviously all of the channels are important whether you're using european federations or whether you're using national associations or your national ministry or your local national government you need to use every channel to be effective it's iterative process you want to put that message into the policy process as many times with as many different hats as possible and you want to use your national ministry to to perhaps influence the commodolology process you want to go to you have your government ministers going and talking uh at the perm rep so that your message comes in again and again and again this to one degree is one of the problems when you're trying to capture and measure particularly in transparency registers how much a particular company is lobbying is sometimes you don't see the the how much the firm has actually lobbied because it's double hatting it's wearing it's wearing different guises different different hats depending on where it's coming in along the policy process it might be putting its voice in by this european federation or having lobbied hard at the national ministry on some technical aspect for comatology and so effective lobbying means that you use the nation state and the european is multi-level and it's multi-multi-institution and i think that comes out very clearly from from the study and how firms have learned to play the complex multi-level governance environment that is europe okay so that's basically and in the book we talk about how that change has happened and where the institutions have evolved and changed and how multi-level governance comes into play how regulatory governance comes into play how how the the different administrative structures work um but obviously in 25 minutes can't can't touch all of that so the second part of the book as i said is the mazer where we want to look at institutional demand and firm level or interest group supply and we want to look at how policy institutions and the policy cycle potentially affect um what we said before um one mobilization to the types of interest groups that play and whether we see an elite pluralist environment so this particular table in front of us is the current transparency register for the different dgs of the european commission um with the different policy areas and one of our hypotheses one of our arguments in in the book going back to this point about input and output legitimacy which came through very much in our early qualitative discussions both with commission officials and with with firms was did the nature of the good change what the institutions demanded and we believed it would and what we see here are two very clear phenomena one is interest groups mobilize where there's high levels of regulation environment business and industry single market energy climate change competition and so forth so the total number of interest groups is largest but the types of interest groups that are involved in each of these different types of policies changes in terms of the ratio and what we see is if you look at the the the dark gray that's basically business on business interests that have have made representation in those policy areas and so areas that are highly regulatory where there are high demands on technical inputs we tend to see a much higher concentration of in-house business mobilization and a slow a smaller ratio of ngos so the companies mobilize and they are active in in the policy in those in those policy debates and when we look down at maybe redistributive policy areas in education or youth or culture you see there the commission is perhaps trying to see it be part of a wider consultation wants to be seen to be having input legitimacy that it's tried to talk to all the stakeholders and there we'll see ratios where the ngos and business um tend to be more evenly distributed of course the the the primary costs to industry are obviously reduced in some of these policy areas whereas when we're talking about technical regulations it may cost them a great deal of money if they don't get the right regulation you know in terms of retooling or having to create new specifications or create new new products completely um so obviously mobilization rates are a function of the salience of the the issue but also on the supply side and the and on the demand side what the institution is seeking to to to to legitimize and to to facilitate so one of those that was for the european commission one of the things we were interested is was behavior the same there'd been a lot of discussion in the literature that with the european parliament we would be talking more and more about democratic legitimacy and less about technocratic policy-making legitimacy and so we wanted to see if this was the case in the book we create ratios of the same this is a the same policy areas for the committees uh and we created the same policy areas for the european commission and we we made them both 100 to see if ratios were the same and i'll explain why we had to do that so looking at the european parliament there are less interest groups that have a cred are accredited um to to go to the uh the parliament there's about 1 500 to 2 000 interest accredited at any one time that translates into about 4 000 individuals um about two-thirds of those 4 000 individuals are also lobbying the european commission and are seen in the transparency register and about one-third of these of this of this new pie are are totally new interest groups that are perhaps mobilized for the issues that the parliament is dealing with have come up from come up from the nation states so but what's also interesting if if you look to the book and you saw the pie for the european parliament is the ratios are about the same about 50 percent are in-house business groups and 23 are ngos so almost exactly the same ratios in terms of mobilizations of interest in the parliament and in the european commission however if you remember my point about the two-thirds one-third new and old are interest groups this is where the difference plays out most of the companies of that 50 operating in the european parliament are also operating in the european commission they have the resources to follow the policy cycle and the policy process whereas not all of the ngos that are active in the european commission are also transposing across to the european parliament and often we see more national ngos coming up and so this comes down to resources and ability to to reiterate the void your voice across the whole of the policy cycle so anyway looking at accredited activity in the european parliament across different policy domains what's very interesting again is we saw exactly the same ratios mobilizing for regulatory or redistributed policies when we mirror the two policy areas for regulation single market business and industry and so forth competition um you see the same ratio of interest groups um coming to play um and again you see an output an input legitimacy argument emerging when we start to look at the distributive and redistributive policy areas and so what's interesting to us is we had heard in in the early days of these studies that the voice and the types of interest that participated in the policy process of the european parliament would be different because they bring the democratic um aspect to the policy process but what we've started to see as we did this more and more of the detailed analysis of policy committees within the parliament was actually the ep was much more part of the technocratic policy-making process because of the dry logs because of the fact that so much of the policy is at first readings and so therefore it's played out at the committees and interest groups realized that it was about technical influence and input into the debate as the trilogues feed back on one another and that the wins of the european commission needed to be consolidated and pushed through in the committees of the european parliament so that's one thing we noticed um and that's definitely true in in regulatory areas where we saw more input legitimacy as opposed to output legitimacy was where the process was more about olp the ordinary legislative process where we would start to see basically sorry i'll represent when they had the parliament had right of initiative and own initiative we saw a more diverse uh cluster of interest groups whereas when it was olp it tended to follow that sort of regulatory output output legitimacy sort of model so i think one of the things that struck us is that there is variety in pluralism there's a chameleon pluralism but it's not across institutions it was across the policy types um in the policy process and i haven't got time today to also talk about the policy process but we also saw the mobilization rates varied across across the policy process as well and so business follows the whole cycle but ngos tended to try and be at the early stages in the consultations and then would go back into their national models and perm and the perm wraps um okay so that is sort of the mazer part of the story that the the nature of the good the nature of the policy cycle drives more of the mobilization and style of political activity than the the institutions themselves um but how do you manage this whole policy process um and this was the third part of the book and i think perhaps one of the most original parts of the book was this study of how the micro side how firms organize their government affairs offices and it's moved from a one person outfit who perhaps had been at the commission or have perhaps been a menace uh and had been a senior civil servant in a domestic in a domestic ministry who gets seconded to brussels and and and joins and joins the company and it's moved to this professionalization of government affairs so today government affairs in brussels on average a government affairs office spends about 50 000 euros it's on average between two and five people there's probably some 350 la well dedicated european affairs teams is what i've just described and the people who are in them are usually quite senior in terms of their accountability within the company they report to the board although you definitely report to a senior a senior director on the board in terms of their line management they've been in the companies for a long time they've grown through the sector and through the companies and they know the business models they know what what are the the lines that can and can't be crossed in terms of the success for the the future of these companies and they've also been in these public affairs stroke government affairs offices for a long time as well um so this is an interesting phenomena so when a lot of people have talked about brussels over the last 20 years they tend to want to talk about business about revolt talk about revolving doors but actually our study showed for this sort of 350 companies uh individuals that actually 70 percent of them had come through industry through the private sector and actually very few have come out of the european institutions themselves certainly at the senior level at the senior level commission officials stay in their jobs for a long time they they believe in the european project they're incredibly well paid they have golden golden cages so they're not looking to move in the same way that american administrators who have to change with the administration are looking for for the next job in the private sector and are looking for better paid jobs in the private sector so the revolving door phenomena at the high level is less than one would expect now the junior level where after stargazers or junior members of the team we see slight variation there you know people who've worked has come out of the college of europe or have come out of being assistants to mps and so forth may particularly in high legislative periods for companies end up in these more junior positions perhaps while they're waiting to pass the con call to get to get into the european commission but certainly the revolving door phenomena at the level of government affairs offices not boards of companies mps and senior commissioners go on to join boards after their their time but certainly in terms of government affairs day to day there's less revolving doors than we would expect in national capitals all we see definitely definitely in in in washington um the only other thing i'd say is actually the career path as well in terms of educational backgrounds is very different to the us in the us we tend to see people who study public affairs or law as career paths into government affairs whereas in we see a very diverse career path in terms of education from science to to to social sciences to medicine to to technical engineering subjects tends to be a diverse group of people just as you would have into any private sector organization so it again shows these people are initially coming in as part of the graduate schemes of their companies and then perhaps doing mbas and specialist degrees as they they evolved through so the nature of these people are professional government affairs but professional individuals from the sector from which they emerge so very briefly i think i've said much of this but if you were to compare the eu with the us you would see the u.s logic of interaction as an economic transaction whereas you'd see a trust-based relationship in the eu based around information and technical exchange whereas in the us it's about votes and fun and funding packs campaign contributions i don't know what's spent in total in the us but it's a huge sum on campaign contributions only three million pounds is spent in the and we talk about it in the book only three million pound euros sorry is spent in in europe in funding political parties and and think tanks time horizon is a very short run in the u.s you have to build long-term relationships and long-term time horizons in the eu um the type of person you would utilize when you delegate to influence you in the us you'd use consultancies usually lobbying firms and then in-house you flip that round in-house is your first point of call to influence in brussels and then the external the turnover is very quick in terms of people in government affairs offices longevity in the eu in the u.s it's estimated you know two-thirds of any of of the staffers in in congress go into private sector as an administration turns around skill sets therefore in the uk in the us are your personal contacts and your knowledge of the political machine but it has a shelf life whereas your your skill sets are about knowing the widgets the technical aspects of the industry are in the eu i'm aware of time so i think i'll stop there and i think i've said everything else i wanted to say so in summary there's a distinct eu lobbying style there's new direct political direct action that has evolved over the last 20 years the logic of collective action has changed and matured as well it's discretion-based politics based on long-run on long-run trust gains uh where you can exclude those lobbyists that are misinforming or have bad practice um you have professionalization of government affairs and there is elite pluralism if you look at the total pool the total number of interest groups but there's a sort of more chameleon pluralist model that you have to think about when you disaggregate to the different types of policy area and the policy cycle so i think i'll stop there win and you've as i said to you earlier you've watched this project evolve over the 30 years so i look forward to hearing what you think thank you very much david we will pass over to window but i just want to remind the audience that you can send your questions to me through the webinar chat box window and thank you very much david for this uh very uh concise uh and this is the tour de force of your book in just a short 30 minutes that was quite amazing so i pass over now to win and i will drop a picture because we're having a bit of a technical difficulty with the camera so just let the audience know okay well thank you for the invitation to take part today this book is clearly an important contribution to our understanding of business government relations at the eu level it combines theoretical methodological and empirical contributions and the empirical analysis as david has pointed out draws on more than 30 years of work and hence real in-depth expertise i think an illustration of the empirical insights is this discussion of the way in which the government affairs function has moved from being improvised to professionalism as david mentioned when he started in studying these things in brussels there are just about 50 people working in government relations divisions and now because there are several hundred the sort of person who fulfills these roles is described and assessed but i think who to hire for them remains the important question strategy for a company may still need to be determined at board level leaving tactics the relatively senior but still essentially middle management government relations experts in brussels i think another interesting insight which david highlighted is the way in which associations have sharpened up their act and become much more effective organizations and in particular tapping directly into the big companies in their sectors i think if we're looking at it conceptually then there are two key insights in the book that should be emphasized one is the need to bring together demand and supply perspectives on business government relations the other is bridging the perspectives offered by business studies and management theories and those of political science what we can see is that information isn't the core of lobbying but it is not a neutral commodity and the way in which an issue is framed is in fact very important now although a variety of theoretical perspectives is available which each of each of them generates insights it is noted in the book there has still been little work on the micro political theory of the firm this is something which has interested me for a long time too long really along which i have not made any real progress one comes up against the fact that firms are primarily economic actors and politics is a means to achieving their economic profit maximizing goals rather than the gold itself it is concluded in the book that there's an exceptional mode of business government relations in brussels which reflects of course the fact that the eu is a polity like no other i think what comes out is there a very complex decision-making processes which require a great deal of sophistication about which channels to use and when to use them it is noted in the book that the literature avoids fundamental normative discussions on political representation and democratic legitimacy and it is the normative implications of the analysis that i would now like to turn and raise some questions it's the big picture i'm concerned with here rather than the specific challenges of lobbying regulation which are acknowledged to be complex now the overall perspective as david has pointed out that is identified in the book is one of elite pluralism although i would add that i think what we have in the european union is a very technocratic version of elite pluralism the book states that business is part of a wide diverse ecosystem of actors that produces efficient and legitimate public policy business seen as working within broader advocacy coalitions nevertheless business retains a dominant position and that's not surprising when we saw from one of the graphs that half of the 12 000 or so groups are in fact business groups now working within broader advocacy coalitions may be convenient in relation to particular policy arenas with coalitions with ngos adding legitimacy to the business position however it is not necessarily evidence of more inclusive decision-making processes present arrangements yes they may produce effective and legitimate public policy at least some of the time but do we have a set of arrangements in which business retains a dominant position and is this satisfactory if we were to apply some kind of broader democratic test where do the interests of business weigh in the balance against the views of citizens given um that we have a sort of as david said a one-to-one in terms of numbers between the personnel and the institutions and the personnel in these business organizations i think there's also another secondary question here which is how effectively can small and medium-sized enterprises access these processes particularly new high-tech companies that may be emerging in areas for example concerned with environmental protection now i think one of the strengths of the book is that it does synthesize the evidence about how the system works so we can then get a very good understanding of how it operates and then i think perhaps we can start to make normative judgments about it and suggest how it might be improved from a democratic perspective and that's really um where i'd like to conclude because i think that's the central observation i'd like to make we've known each other a long time so there'd probably be some intellectual capture of each other over the years very sympathetic to the points winner win is making um in terms of the voice of of of smaller groups smes for example or new entrants as you said one of the things that's been interesting and i think i alluded to with the restructuring of the trade associations was that we've seen increasing and i guess with changing technology and the fact you can have more virtual associations you don't need to have as bigger office look you know uh representation is we've seen the disaggregation and emergence of more and more european associations so in telecoms and in in energy for example um when we had the liberalization directives that went through we had the large incompetent energy sector and telecom sectors but very quickly we saw the emergence of new entrant trade associations as well and i can see in the emergence potentially as you said for these small tech companies that maybe come in with environmental solutions perhaps for perhaps new new um coalitions of of of tech environmental associations that that may emerge the other thing that often happens here as you alluded to as well when is the emergence of complex advocacy coalitions i think the cleavages are no longer the traditional cleavages of capital v labor or or or business for these citizens we see actually ish and i think i was trying to say that in the book as well that we see that the cleavages are around the debates and fights that happen around a policy or a piece of regulation and so business may be fighting business big business against uh big business you know high energy users against low energy users and there you know these new entrants and environmental uh energy solutions or or ngos can become gatekeepers they can become legitimizers of the position because as we said influence is about the credibility of the information you bring and if you are bringing a complex coalition obviously coalition that seems to be capturing a a representative sample within the debate that gives your group more traction more weight in in the consultation processes and therefore potentially greater influence um and and ability to to to frame that first sixty percent um so i think what we often see with ngos um is their ability to be as well as sometimes going head to head with with industry and sometimes holding shining the light you have different types of activity ngos sometimes are insiders and sometimes they want to be outside sometimes they want to shine the light on on the malpractice of business or the misinformation of business but at other times they want to work with business because they can be a countervailing voice with with the with the countervailing economic interests so it is as as you and i both know i'm a much more complex web of of activity in in trying to get the air and uh of of the policy maker so in some respects you know that that's where smes and where ngos are perhaps most likely to be effective in in building and helping to frame and define coalitions often working in think tanks brussels one of the things we shouldn't underestimate in brussels is the importance of policy think tanks that offer we often become the echo chambers to to initiate debates to just to initiate the policy one of the things that's in the book that i didn't have time to talk about is when you look along the policy cycle you see how much think tanks are involved in the early days and so there that's where you get unusual coalitions of actors coming together to start to create the blue sky thinking of the next agenda that needs to emerge within within brussels um the voice of citizens in brussels well that's a huge question that um i think i'll i'll avoid that um in as far as i you know i what i would like to say is i think the citizens voice which we often think of in the parliament it's not perhaps not as strong as people often think in terms of um certainly in terms of the policy making around comet the comatology process um in the early days we used to hear the companies and and business groups would change their voice would change the way they would frame a debate and they would perhaps move it away from about the technical regulation and would talk about the jobs back home that would be lost if the technical regulation that they were pushing for wasn't wasn't wasn't taken and and that was about sort of you know trying to to talk to the mps that had constituencies and and um and and we're representing citizens back home and i'm sure that happens to a degree still but quite often it as i as i've said um the the committees are are working to very short timelines within within a comatology process and and then a signing off in a first reading so the politics ironically of the parliament is sometimes less than one would expect is that is that good for for now win and then we can come back if we need to yeah that's fine i think i'd like to give others an opportunity to ask questions now thank you very much uh for that and now i will start bringing in some of the questions from the audience we have quite a few so i will get started let's see what our time check yeah we've got 15 minutes so i think we have plenty of time for a couple of good questions so we have a couple of questions related to the future of eu loving and what the impact of brexit might be going forward um one from thomas tinderman's asking about brexit and another from alexandria rusu asking about what eu lobby might look like in 10 years what will 2031 look like compared to 2021 and then we have another question and going back to the coalition formation that you have been discussing um already so but in a less normative way if you see any if you have any commentary on trends across policy fields or time in terms of coalition formation in brussels especially businesses forming coalitions with other actor groups such as ngos and on a quick relatively related note to ngos leia orozco is asking if there's an average size of ngos you had mentioned ngos as a slice of that pie of participants in the lobbying scene and if there's a particular size of ngo that is more commonly participating and then we can maybe have another round of questions after that uh so we'll start there okay brexit oh gosh um i have to write a paper for win on this um so i'm just starting my thinking well obviously british firms are no longer insiders um so they're though they would be developing direct action like every other company what i should say about british firms is actually ironically the first companies to really lobby in the eu in the in the eu were actually american companies uh in the early days when pushing for for the single market and so forth and that was partly because they didn't have home bases they didn't have the blocking votes before qualified majority voting in paris or in bonn or in rome and other places and they also had a tradition of of direct lobbying and working with agencies so american companies were the first in but the second and after the americans were actually the british companies um so sort of you sort of the uh anglo-saxon sort of liberal models of of political action and business and they again were comfortable with direct action and direct lobbying and so in many ways british companies started the game and started much of the the style of political activity that i'm i've explained and i would imagine that they will continue to have their government affairs offices in brussels um you know many of these are multi multinational companies or you know anglo dutch companies a couple of them at least um so they will continue to have their government affairs they may have production around europe where they have have a voice um but what i think two things is before they could use the perm rep they could go back into the nation state and lobby the national government to to perhaps try and do deals at the council exchanging some some condition on on fisheries to get the appropriate in um air air quality control or whatever it was and there would be you know there'd be log rolling they no longer have that option and also at the technical level they no longer have commentology they no longer can use the national um civil servants to to to sit on these technical widget committees highly technical committees um so they will lose voice now how can they keep their visibility well one is being involved in that early consultation they're big organizations they're credible they probably still have production across europe or some of them will so they'll use their national their influence in in national states where they have production if they have production in in in prague they will go to you know the czech government or if they have you know production in london lithia they will go to the spanish government um so they will have to play a web into the nation states to try and um continue to have some some voice the perm reps and uh and the council they obviously lose their their influence at the european parliament but again you know look for regional alliances they will have to look for strategic alliances with other large corporations or other firms that have similar interests that are embedded in europe so we might see more interesting coalitions being formed uh more clubs business clubs but i don't think they'll be totally excluded if we look at japanese companies if we look at american companies today you know as long as they've got you know production in europe and they are they are pushing for standards that that fit with the the broader goals of the european agenda the and the broader european integration process they will be credible voices um the problem will be if and when british regulations start to diverge dramatically from from if they do from eu regulations um uh what that will mean and where and how they position where they put their primacy um of you know political preference whether they're they're lobbying national government the british government to converge or continue to to stay in line aligned with eu standards because of access to one of the largest markets where they're probably most integrated or whether they they push for the for the european european agenda to be moving in the direction of wherever british regulation emerges it's still very early to tell isn't it where where britain will go and how quickly we can or can't diverge we'll also they'll continue to have voices there's still talk of participation of national national regulatory agencies in the uk but potentially participating in the eu networks we're waiting to see where that goes um and where their voice is so there'll be this sort of bottom up opportunity for influencing the european process through agencies and and and agency networks um as well but um it's very early days um i think a lot of car i've spoken to actually quite a few companies around this issue and um they're they're trying to get their head ahead around this and i think they will they will probably expand and uh and continue to maintain their presence in brussels um 20 31 to 22 in a way i'm sort of talking about that in i think the phenomena of professionalization will continue uh more companies will come in over time um as an european project continue assuming the european project continues to evolve and and and i think british companies will will continue to maintain their their visibility and act and active participation in the policy process i'm aware of time i think in terms of coalitions i sort of answered that already when i was talking to wynn um ngos do depending on whether they're taking an insider or outside the strategy you know do they sometimes work with coalitions of businesses and they gatekeep they define define and legitimize um and sometimes they want to stay outside of these coalitions and they want to hold people to account it depends on the issue it depends on the ngos some ngos see it as a duty to to to to to hold hold the great and the good to account and and rightly so and others want to be part of want to be inside the room where it happens to create the to create the song from hamilton um so there's variation in where business um how business works with ngos you know they can and sometimes they're in in in collaboration sometimes they're in um in direct conflict and then the size of ngos again it varies um if you're interested you can actually go in and just look at what they declare of their offices on the transparency register so you know i would imagine you know organizations like friends of the earth or will be or or worldwide life you know will have you know an office and and some individuals and others may just be an individual coming in on a eurostar to brussels whenever whenever a committee meets um if you know when when the world allows us to travel again so there will be a huge discrepancy from those that have capacity on the ground in brussels and a few people through to smaller you know one one individual um group so you know they're obviously going to be smaller i mean most companies are only as i say two to five people in brussels so i'd be surprised that there are many many ngos bigger than that okay thank you very much i think we have maybe time for one or two more uh this year we saw five minutes so we have one question um asking whether if you have any insight into whether international arenas such as the world bank or oecd or who have a more similar lobbying style to the us or to the eu model and then another question um you've pointed out the differences between eu and u.s lobbying with eu more based on knowledge exchange input etc but do we see a difference in how these lobbying activities even though they're structured very differently um if they're perceived differently by citizens in the um if that makes a difference i guess does it make a big difference if the key ingredient is the high level social network versus the monetary contribution um from a level of citizen perceptions and then i don't know if we maybe we will stop there and see if we have time for a couple more we still have uh just okay um i i haven't done the study of the oecd or world bank on wto um certainly wto companies have offices in brighton in geneva um and they get invited to some committees i think they it's harder but i i don't know this there's been some good work by some people in um in uh i think in antwerp who've been working looking at this um how interests have mobilized and business interests have mobilized my suspicion is it's probably how brussels was in its earlier days you know it's an earlier phenomenon it's more smoke-filled runs it's who you know getting invited to um there isn't a transparency register for sure because i did want to look to see if i could do a similar analysis and in fact they don't even have the same accreditation list that you would see for the european parliament um so but yes the world bank and the wto are lobbied um there are offices and obviously in washington big companies go and knock on the door and we'll talk about you know various contracts and opportunities um the oecd interestingly actually has a massive unit called the transparency unit which looks at best practice for transparency registers around the world and you know and studies what's going on in germany or in hungary or in the uk um uh about one of my old phds um yuki works at um on this very on these very on this very issue so they're they're more less about perhaps being lobbied and more about um monitoring the lobbyists um which is very interesting and there's some very interesting reports there um that have come out on transparency over the last last couple of years i'm looking at revolving doors actually in best practice to regulate on you know cooling down periods when people have left left government before they can join boards of companies and so forth um and then the difference between eu and us um i think the problem is like much of europe is that people are so distant from from brussels and this is one of the critique suppressors i think many people don't probably even appreciate the scale of lobbying that occurs in brussels um the most the average person doesn't realize the voice that companies have and that you know brexit is a case in point when people would say you know my voice is not heard my my my company isn't they probably didn't even realize that nissan or or or or whatever company it was was actually going to brussels actively lobbying on their behalf to maintain their jobs um so i think there's a big disconnect perhaps because it is a a more you know it's a more technocratic and less visible or visible style of of lobbying whereas the u.s lobbying everyone has to declare their packs and you see you know there's all these reports every year the company x has spent the most on lobbying um but it's seen as you know in the u.s there's been scandals and there's you know they've got a very stringent code of conduct it's probably actually got the tightest code of conduct on uh on lobbyists and lobbying behavior um you know tighter than we have in in europe in some respects so because of that risk because there's money involved people are seeing this you know there's it has a negative connotations but it is also regulated quite heavily in the us thank you very much i don't think we have time for more questions but i have a number so i'll pass them along to you via email so you can at least have a look at them and arrange some discussion but uh before leaving the audience today i just want to let the audience know that the globe's webinar series will continue next month on the 6th of may actually just next week with julia crying camp and tom pegram on a new book actually co-authored with david cohen on global climate governance and and then on june 10th we have another one on combating modern slavery uh why labor governance is failing what we can do about it that was authored by jennifer barron so she'll be joining us in june and then we'll take a little bit of a summer break before starting up again in the fall so that those can be registered at uh globe project.eu and you can also watch all the previous webinars including this one so thank you very much for joining us yes thank you very much and i'd recommend next week the book is is really interesting for those of you interested in again understanding the multi-level governance of of environmental global policy making um so very topical with with cop 26 coming coming along um so but i won't i won't force my my voice and you again i'm going to let tom talk next yes week thank you very much oh thank you to our speakers today david and nguyen uh for joining us it was a pleasure to have you today and from the globe project thank you to the audience and goodbye bye thank you win you bye thanks thank you carrie for organizing everything that was really very smooth till next time i imagine people are still online until we we drop off or maybe give you a quick team call afterwards just to say hi and thank you sounds great see you soon you