The OMC inclusion and national social NGOs: From enthusiasm to ...

policy development and implementation. Third, and more related to this OMC (as well as tothe other social OMCs) is their very low degree of public visibility, or, as a French actor putit, their existence clandestine, making it difficult to discover traces of the process - other thanthe official documents, but even these are not always made public – as well as to control forwhat one hears or reads. Which leads to fourth, a more general difficulty, but particularlypresent in such a sensitive policy area, that the interviewees are all actors with institutionaland / or political and normative interests to be defended against various other actors, makingit even harder to come to a balanced conclusion. If an actor mentions the OMC as anargument that change occurred, this can be strategically motivated and must not necessarilybe true just as the absence of reference must not mean that the OMC had no consequences(Büchs 2004).These – and other – considerations have been broadly absent or ignored in the conceptual anddescriptive OMC literature which has tended to see the OMC as a tool for supranationallearning, mostly concluding that it can promote learning processes and eventually, that it hasalready promoted them. I have attempted to show that this scholarly majority is mislead withthe learning assumption, or more precisely, in connecting the OMC inclusion to (significantand organizational) learning processes, in the way of which stand institutional, organisational,political and normative differences as well as the organisation of the OMC itself (Kröger2006a; Kröger 2006b forthcoming). Interviewees have repeatedly stated that they thought thatlearning processes were taking place in the EU, not through this OMC, however. Instead, itmakes more sense to evaluate the OMC in the well-known categories of effectiveness andlegitimacy (Offe 1998; Scharpf 1999). Due to the non-binding character, effectiveness,however, needs to be defined and evaluated in different ways (than looking at policyperformances and programmes as these cannot be clearly tracked back to the OMC). Withinmy PhD research, I am differentiating between internal effectiveness and externaleffectiveness, the prior relating to the domestic, the latter to the EU level (Kröger 2005). Bothlevels are analysed in terms of institutional capability building, a necessary predecessor ofpolicy development, and therewith effectiveness (Sacchi 2004). Institutional capabilitybuilding happens if resources are increased, if knowledge and awareness are increased andeventually lead to learning processes, if interministerial coordination is increased, if timelydata (indicators) exists and is made available, if one succeeds at placing the process at a highlevel of the involved institutions – a precondition of which is that the process is politicallyaccepted. Summarizing, the OMC inclusion could said to have been effective if it contributed