Policy Entrepreneurship and Agenda Setting: Comparing and Contrasting the Origins of the European Research Programmes for Security and Defense

This chapter builds on the theoretical and empirical insights of Edler and James (Res Policy 44:1252–1265, 2015) to examine the origins of the European Defence Research Programme (EDRP). Edler and James (Res Policy 44:1252–1265, 2015) used a process tracing methodology to examine the emergence of the European Security Research Programme (ESRP) as part of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). The case study shows that the emergence of the ESRP could only be understood by taking into account the policy entrepreneurship of the European Commission. In particular, the paper identifies the role of individual mid-ranking Commission officials who identified a window of opportunity to put the theme on the agenda and mobilized the political and financial resources of selected Directorate Generals of the European Commission. The policy entrepreneurs orchestrated the framing of this policy through managing ideational discourse and mobilizing existing and novel actor networks. In doing so the Commission gained the credibility to be the venue for science and technology policy in the area of security research. The paper also showed how the policy entrepreneurs used ambiguity in the definition of the meaning, scope and rationale for “security research” as a means of assembling a transnational coalition of interests and masking the initial cognitive and normative differences that existed between the various interest actors. The chapter will use process tracing to examine the origins of the EDRP. Specifically, the chapter will consider whether – following neofunctionalism (Haas EB, The uniting of Europe: political, social and economic forces 1950–57. Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1958; Sandholtz W, Stone Sweet A (eds), European integration and supranational governance. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998; Stone Sweet A, Sandholtz W, Fligstein N (eds), The institutionalization of Europe. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001) – the EDRP is simply an instance of “spillover” from security research to defense research or whether other factors are at play.