“Europe’s expanding coordination space” Keynote – Prof. Mark Dawson (Hertie School)

Chair: Prof. Paul Dermine (IEE-ULB)

Word of Welcome by Prof. Federico Fabbrini (Dublin City University, Ireland), PI of the PROSPER Network

This lecture explores the rise of the world of policy coordination as an alternative to the legal world, interacting with it but also supplanting it in key fields of EU governance. This coordination world carries different governing features and institutions, different capacities yet also poses different constitutional and legitimacy challenges when compared to the legal world. Where does this new world leave EU lawyers? A key role may be not to resist the rise of policy coordination but to infuse it with better elements of the legal world – namely its social and constitutional safeguards – while leaving behind its pathologies (an undemocratic and overly homogenizing vision of governance).

This Keynote was organised in the framework of the IDEAS26, the biennial Interdisciplinary conference on European Advanced Studies, which is a three-day scientific event organized by the Institut d’études européennes of the Université libre de Bruxelles (IEE-ULB) in collaboration with the Brussels School of Governance of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (BSoG-VUB) and the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Warwick (PaIS-UoW).

The IDEAS26 edition is co-organised with the Jean Monnet Network PROSPER. The conference took place in Brussels, on May 27-29, 2026, and it will focus on New paths towards prosperity in the European Union – Rethinking Governance, Integration and Collective Well-Being.