International Reflections on Administrative Procedure: OECD and Council of Europe

Since the 90s, two intergovernmental organizations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (Oecd) and the Council of Europe, started publishing recommendations concerning national administrative procedures. In the activity of the two organizations, some common principles for national administrative procedure emerge, such as transparency, participation, and the recommendation to adopt decisions within a reasonable amount of time. However, the scope of the activity of the two organizations diverge, as well as their goal and impact. The Oecd’s activity in the field of regulatory policy dates back to the mid 90s, when the first set of Recommendations on Improving the Quality of Government Regulation was published, strictly connected with the objective of fostering countries’ competitiveness. In the following years, the Oecd published an extremely high number of documents, in which a gradual evolution in the organization’s policy can be traced. In the 2012 Recommendation on Regulatory Policy and Governance, the perspective adopted by the Oecd is no longer the one of “ad hoc” reforms, but the one of an overall and comprehensive regulatory policy, in which open government, the active participation of stakeholders and simplification have a key role. Through an extensive use of peer reviews, the Oecd influenced national governments in shaping their regulatory policies, even beyond the number of its Member States. The Council of Europe, on the contrary, appears less successful under this regard. Its Code on good administration of 2007 aims at recognizing existing best practices and at pushing States that do not align to these practices to adopt them. The lack of innovative impact, as well as the lack of tools intended to foster the implementation of the Code, has so far limited the influence of the Council of Europe in shaping national administrative procedures.