Stabilising the Policy Domain, 1973–76

Abstract

From 1973 to 1976 education was explicitly recognised as a policy domain in which the Community action had some role, both as a sector in which there was a developing law and — not coterminous and rather ambiguous — a developing common education policy based not on binding law, but on public international law or Community ‘soft law’.¹ But on the basis of this account they can more accurately be seen as the years in which for the first time a resource-based policy could be designed. This chapter shows how and why it was possible to develop policy-making in a form which broke new ground in Community governance.