Public Money & Management

ISSN: 0954-0962 (Print) 1467-9302 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpmm20

New development: Implementing and evaluating

government strategic plans—the Europe 2020
Strategy

Anne Drumaux & Paul Joyce

To cite this article: Anne Drumaux & Paul Joyce (2020): New development: Implementing and
evaluating government strategic plans—the Europe 2020 Strategy, Public Money & Management,
DOI: 10.1080/09540962.2020.1722395

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09540962.2020.1722395

Published online: 10 Feb 2020.

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PUBLIC MONEY & MANAGEMENT
https://doi.org/10.1080/09540962.2020.1722395

New development: Implementing and evaluating government strategic plans—

the Europe 2020 Strategy
Anne Drumauxa and Paul Joyceb
a
Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Belgium; bInstitute for Local Government Studies (Inlogov), University of
Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article examines the implementation of the Europe 2020 Strategy. The authors analysed the Europe 2020 Strategy;
strategic and management plans of the European Commission’s directorates-general (DGs) to political will; strategic
identify the main and dominant discourses in the documents. The supplementing or management; textometric
supplanting of the simple strategy framework of the early years by a political framework analysis
after 2014 can be seen as caused by an interaction between rational management evaluation
on one hand and political values and will on the other.

IMPACT
This article is intended to be directly useful to government policy makers in relation to the
evaluation of inclusive economic growth strategies. It demonstrates, in a European context,
the way in which strategic management can contribute to effective government and public
governance and how this interacts with political leadership.

The problem of delivery

This article focuses on what happened after an interim
evaluation of the results of the Europe 2020 Strategy
found that the strategy might be on course to fail in
some key areas. First, we provide an account of the
situation in 2014 and 2015. We then present our
analysis of planning by the European Commission’s
directorates-general (the DGs), which we conducted
to detect changes in their posture towards the
strategy. We probe issues of monitoring and revision
of the strategy to clarify their nature in a public
governance context.
Context
The Europe 2020 Strategy was launched as a
supranational strategy—a type of public sector
strategy that has received little attention in the
academic literature (George & Desmidt, 2014). The
Commission, under President Barroso, drafted the
strategy in 2010 and it was authorized for
implementation that same year by the European
Council. National plans produced annually by
member states, known as ‘national reform
programmes’, were one of the key means for the
delivery of the strategy. There were also plans for
‘flagship initiatives’ and budgetary changes to deliver
the strategy. The European Union (EU) set up the
European semester as a governance mechanism to
monitor the national reform programmes and to
steer their delivery through the provision of policy
recommendations and warnings to member states.
In 2014, the European Commission published an
interim evaluation of the strategy. It identified areas
where the strategy was thought to be failing
(European Commission, 2014, p. 21). These areas
were employment, research and development, and
poverty reduction. (In early 2020, it still seemed likely
that the strategy would fail in respect of the desired
outcomes for research and development and poverty
reduction.)
Also in 2014, Jean-Claude Juncker became the
president of the Commission. He was nominated by a
political party and secured the support of the
European Council and the European Parliament—this
was by the process known as the ‘Spitzenkandidaten’
system. He saw this system as potentially creating
additional democratic legitimacy for the president
and as consistent with parliamentary democracy. In
this way, in 2014, the new president’s role could be
described as part civil servant and part democratic
politician.
Speaking to the European Parliament as a
presidential candidate, he delivered a statement of
‘political guidelines’ for the European Commission,
which were his written proposals to renew the EU.
These guidelines were titled an Agenda for Jobs,
Growth, Fairness and Democratic Change. The
Guidelines addressed 10 policy areas, of which only
four were aligned with the Europe 2020 Strategy.
Significantly, Juncker positioned his political
guidelines as a political dialogue with parliament, and
not a technocratic one. The guidelines were to later
become the framework for the DG (departmental)

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

2 A. DRUMAUX AND P. JOYCE
strategic plans and management plans of the
Commission.
In 2014, the European Parliament was in favour of
the Europe 2020 Strategy and wanted more action by
the Commission to make the strategy effective. On 22
October 2014, a European Parliament resolution on
the European semester stated, ‘[parliament] recalls
that the EU 2020 priorities and targets such as
fighting poverty and social exclusion remain valid
and should be implemented’. A month later, another
resolution called for more vigorous implementation
of the Europe 2020 Strategy through the policy
recommendations made annually to national
governments (EP 2014/2779(RSP) paragraphs 1, 2).
In 2015, the European Political Strategy Centre
(EPSC), a central services DG, published strategic
notes on the Europe 2020 Strategy querying whether
positive trends being observed in Europe could be
attributed to the strategy. It advised both trying to
make implementation more effective and bringing
the strategy into line with the political guidelines of
the Commission’s president (EPSC, 2015).
In late 2015, the Commission’s annual growth
survey, prepared for the 2016 European semester,
seemed to indicate that the Commission’s response
to the strategy’s poor results would be to make
efforts to improve implementation (European
Commission, 2015, p. 5). It might therefore have been
predicted that, after 2015, the delivery of the Europe
2020 Strategy would have been strengthened
through measures to make implementation more
effective. Then, if successful, the strengthening of
delivery would have helped the headline targets to
be delivered on time. What did happen?
The delivery of the Europe 2020 Strategy was
originally conceived as a co-ordinated set of actions
by member states and by the Commission. The
member states were expected to deliver the Europe
2020 Strategy through their national reform
programmes. This did not change after 2014. EU-wide
initiatives did change. In late 2016, the European
Council authorized work on what was to become the
Industrial Policy Strategy (General Secretariat of the
European Council, 2016, p. 5) and the EU held an
‘industry day’ in 2017 to widen ownership of its
strategic thinking within European industry. The
introduction of the Pillar of Social Rights in 2017
made the priority of reducing poverty part of a wider
framework and its text reinforced the point that it
was a responsibility of national government. There
were also other initiatives in key results areas of the
Europe 2020 Strategy, such as an energy union
(which incorporated a climate policy) and a circular
economy action plan.
There is a possibility that there was some confusion
about the strategic framework after 2014. This may
have weakened the strategy and caused some loss of
co-ordination as a result. The EPSC advice in 2015 to
integrate the Europe 2020 Strategy into Juncker’s
political guidelines implied some potential confusion
in the DGs about governance arrangements. A figure
presented in a document to the European Parliament
Control Committee (European Commission, 2016)
suggested the opposite to the EPSC advice—it
suggested that the political guidelines were steered
by the Europe 2020 Strategy. Juncker’s 10 political
priorities are shown in the figure as adjacent to the
strategic and management plans of the DGs of the
Commission. Did this mean that the guidelines
mattered most to the Commission? Then again, in the
figure, the Europe 2020 Strategy was depicted as an
overarching strategy document and seemed to be
showing the Strategy as steering the political
guidelines: ‘This could be considered as quite a
surprising formal statement of the situation in the
sense that this is by no means obvious from reading
the Commission’s policy recommendations to
member states’ (Drumaux & Joyce, 2018, p. 215). In
other words, the European semester policy
recommendations might not have been clearly
enough linked to the Europe 2020 Strategy.
The final results of the Europe 2020 Strategy are
likely to be unsatisfactory in some key respects. In
2019, it was judged that there would be some
success (for example the target employment rate
would be delivered in 2020), but also some failures.
The target for lifting 20 million people out of the risk
of poverty and social exclusion and the target for
investment in research and development were both
identified as not likely to be met. A report by the
Council of the EU (2019, p. 8) observed:
… by the end of 2017 the number of people at the risk of
poverty was only 4.2 million less than in 2008 … With the
latest figures indicating a rate of R&D investment of
slightly above 2% of GDP, the gap to the 3% target
remains considerable and will not be closed by 2020.
European Commission DGs’ planning
We analysed strategic and management planning
documents of the DGs using Alceste software. This
employs an algorithm that takes co-occurring terms
and regroups them into classes. It calculates a Chi2
index giving the percentage coverage of text units
analysed. Our aim was to identify the main and
dominant discourses in the documents.
Figure 1 presents some of our findings in respect of
strategic plans for 2016–2020. As can be seen, the term
‘target 2020’ was positioned among a group of terms
that included ‘baseline’, ‘milestones’, ‘data’ and
‘targets’, which suggests that the strategy was seen
as important in relation to governance
(accountability). But the Europe 2020 Strategy term
was not associated with terms on the left side of

Figure 1. Factorial clouds: DGs’ strategic plans 2016–2020.
Figure 1, which are about specific policy sectors (for
example transport, energy, climate, education). Our
interpretation is that Europe 2020 was not central to
the main policy concerns of the majority of DGs, even
if it was being addressed for accountability purposes.
Figure 2 shows an analysis of the 2015 management
plans for all DGs (Chi2 = 73%). It suggests the existence
of four discourses. One of these discourses we
identified with terms grouped on the right side of the
figure. We label this a ‘governance discourse’; terms
in this group include the Europe 2020 headline
targets, baseline, procedures, and control and
compliance. Other discourses we linked to policy
sectors and included terms relating to education,
employment, growth, innovation, climate, and market
(see the left-hand side of the figure). Therefore, we
concluded that in both Figures 1 and 2 the Europe
2020 Strategy mattered in relation to governance
(accountability), but not in respect of policy sectors.
We turn now to our analysis of the 2017
management plans. The DGs no longer appeared to
be paying attention to the Europe 2020 targets. There
was still a grouping of terms that were concerned
with a governance process—such as ‘baseline’,
‘control’, ‘manage’ and ‘fraud’, but this did not
include ‘target_2020’ (see Figure 3; Chi2 = 81.4%).
One interpretation of these findings is that the DGs’
management officials, who, in 2015, had been doing
some ‘stretching’ between President Juncker’s
political guidelines and the Europe 2020 Strategy,
PUBLIC MONEY & MANAGEMENT 3
were no longer doing this. They had been in effect
acknowledging the formal importance of the strategy,
but it was not the central focus of planning. But the
stretching between had gone in 2017. Consistent
with this interpretation, the DG secretariat-general
management plan for 2017 stated that the key
authorizing framework for its management plan was
provided by the political objectives of Juncker’s
Commission (Secretariat General Management Plan
2017 p. 4). The secretariat-general had not ceased
having a role in helping member states to deliver the
Europe 2020 Strategy through national reform
programmes. But it was not ensuring its management
plan in 2017 was being primarily aligned to the
strategy. More evidence is the fact that the 2017
management plan of the European Political Strategy
Centre (EPSC) contained no reference at all to the
Europe 2020 Strategy.
We take the view that in this analysis it is not
enough for the strategic plans of DGs to have
mentioned the Europe 2020 Strategy. The Europe
2020 Strategy had to have actually shaped the
strategic intent of the DGs. In fact, there are good
reasons for doubting that the strategic intent of the
DGs was guided by the Europe 2020 Strategy
(Drumaux & Joyce, 2018, p. 227):
However, while all the headline indicators of the
Europe 2020 Strategy were to be found referenced in
the strategic plans of the relevant DGs (i.e.
Secretariat-General, DG Employment, Social Affairs
4 A. DRUMAUX AND P. JOYCE

Figure 2. Factorial clouds: management plans 2015.

Figure 3. Factorial clouds: management plans 2017.

and Inclusion, DG Energy and DG Climate Action), was suggested by key performance indicators, then
none were key performance indicators for these DGs. none of these DGs was focused strongly on the
That is, if we assume the intended focus of the DGs Europe 2020 Strategy.

We conclude that the Commission’s DGs did not use
their strategic plans to increase their attention to
delivering the Europe 2020 Strategy after 2015—their
attention, at least as far as their own departmental
responsibilities were concerned, was now largely given
over to Juncker’s political guidelines, which were wider
in scope than the strategy. Meanwhile the member
states were supposed to continue delivering the Europe
2002 Strategy, being monitored annually through the
work of the Commission and being steered through the
forum of the European semester process.
Discussion and conclusion
In idealistic accounts, strategic management may be
portrayed as an integrative development (Poister &
Streib, 1999, p. 308): ‘It integrates all other management
processes to provide a systematic, coherent, and
effective approach to establishing, attaining, monitoring,
and updating an agency’s strategic objectives’. The
design of the Europe 2020 Strategy and its governance
arrangements might seem to stack up well against
normative and idealistic constructions of strategic
management. So, speaking ideally, the headline targets
of the Europe 2020 Strategy would have been factored
into national reform programmes, flagship initiatives,
and budget plans, and then these would have been
vigorously implemented, followed up by monitoring
and evaluation, which would have caused timely
revisions and corrections that delivered the strategy
successfully. But did actual delivery live up to the
promise of the original design?
When the final evaluation is made of the Europe 2020
Strategy, the causes of the failures to deliver the poverty
reduction and R&D investment outcomes of the strategy
will need to be determined. Was the strategy feasible
and were desired outcomes actually possible? Were
the national reform programmes of member states
focused on the right things and strong enough or too
weak? The European Parliament had wanted the
Commission to strengthen the Europe 2020 Strategy,
including through the European semester policy
recommendations. Did the Commission make the best
possible use of the European semester system for
monitoring and improving the actions of member
states? Were the the early ‘flagship initiatives’ under
Barroso and the strategic initiatives under Juncker
effective? Was the strategy generally well delivered in
terms of co-ordination within the Commission and
collaboration with member states?
As it became clear in 2014 that the delivery of the
strategy was faltering, a political-management
process occurred that shaped the subsequent work of
the Commission on initiatives and the European
semester. That is, the political guidelines refocused
the DGs’ strategic direction. Deciding whether this
was a beneficial change is a task for an end of
strategy evaluation.
PUBLIC MONEY & MANAGEMENT 5
Our theoretical framing of these events is important
for the lessons that need to be learnt from evaluation.
We would suggest that the monitoring and revision of
this strategy in this public governance setting was not
reducible to monitoring and correction of strategy by
management. Nor does it do justice to actual events
to say that it was a management process that had
been affected by political factors. In the context of
this public governance experience, it seems more
valid to say that strategic management processes had
involved both public administration and political
management. These two worlds had interacted in
and through strategic management processes. It
might be inferred from the words of President
Juncker that he, a key actor, was concerned with
bringing about both government effectiveness and
democratic legitimacy.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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