Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

The project investigates recent negotiations over reform to the governance of telecoms in the EU to test an innovative endogenous account of EU institutional change. Given public sensitivity towards straight policy transfers to the EU, European states tend to hold onto these powers while seeking ways to coordinate their exercise when they raise complex, transnational issues. Increasingly they turn therefore to transnational networks made up of their own national policymaking experts, to which they submit their policy for scrutiny, as a means of systematising policy innovation and the exchange/emulation of best practice, but without any degree of harmonisation, but only a softer disciplining via expert peer review, monitoring and evaluation. The orthodox explanation for this 'New Governance' trend attributes it to the preferences of national governments, but the project reverses this to ask whether the very expert networks upon which this mode of governance depends might in fact account for its (trans)formation.\n\nTaking expert networks' well-documented influence over policymaking for granted, the project considers whether it might extend to the design of the processes through which they exert that influence, in which case they are likely to ramp up certain characteristics in those processes that we associate with them: Organised around a common professional outlook, rather than national affiliation, they prefer to operate above 'parochial' national politics, in cooperative, technocratic and transnational settings. Their rationalist orientation resonates with the EU's legitimacy-by-results orientation, while their faith in experimentation, peer-review, and consensus-building resonates with its New Governance mode, though not its more top-down, harmonizing modes.\n\nOn this account, less formalised (but nonetheless transnational) communities of expertise that pre-exist their formal induction into New Governance's networks, lobby to be taken into this institutional fold, from where they are powerfully positioned to push for more of the same. Once established, a New Governance trajectory is therefore path-dependent; its entangled/symbiotic relationship with its expert networks making the two self-reinforcing. Better able to generate reasons to grow their power than others are at wresting it back, their specialist expertise emancipates them from their generalist political masters, who they easily out-manoeuvre to pull away from national political structures, while avoiding absorption into the EU's own structures, thus carving out a transnational governance space between the levels that lacks equivalent checks upon them.\n\nThe tortuous negotiations over the EU's new regulatory framework for telecoms (2006-2010) present an ideal laboratory for testing this theory. The project does not concern those aspects relating to substantive telecoms regulation, but only to reform to the institutional architecture and, more specifically: (1) the design of the new EU regulator, which boiled down to a choice between a network of national regulators or a centralised agency; and (2) the extent of the European Commission's powers over remedies designed by national regulators to solve competition problems on their telecoms markets, which boiled down to whether it should be able to veto and/or harmonise them. The significance of these issues is that the choices fall either side of the fault-line that the project investigates. Expressed in binary terms, they pitch traditional EU decision-making against New Governance; centralised implementation/harmonisation against decentralised processes and local discretion; and an EU agency against a networked model. We know something of the preferences and negotiating positions of the key actors and the outcomes of the negotiations, but need to research the influence of the network of national regulators in getting to this point.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

In the form of an artist's book and e-book, Golden (Notes) will document and critically reflect upon the various visual, audio, installation and live strategies of four related works (Golden (Vistas}, Golden (Songs), Golden (Years) and Golden (Voices)), to be exhibited at Beaconsfield and Chinese Arts Centre between 2005 and 2006. The e/book will include an experimental text­ work that will first appear as periodic posts to an online 'blog' or journal for the duration of the e/book's development. In addition, four writers/practitioners will be commissioned to research and develop original texts, which expand both conceptually and formally on the issues, concepts and themes explored in the series. Working across visual and audio culture, literature, choreography, and film, the progressive production of texts will be punctuated by formal and informal dialogues on- and off-line. In sum, the resulting outputs will comprise a limited edition artist's book, an e-book distributed as both limited edition CD-rom and unlimited PDF download, a blog, and gallery-based and online discussions. The research will thereby reach academics, artists, students, contemporary art audiences, internet users, and those with particular interests in theories, practices and interdisciplinary tactics of cultural representation, production and dissemination, in and of diaspora.