'New Governance' in European Corporate Law Regulation as Transnational Legal Pluralism

Abstract

The present transformation of European corporate governance regulation mirrors the challenges that have been facing the EUs continuously evolving polity, marked by tensions between centralized integration programs on the one hand and Member States embedded capitalisms, path-dependencies and rent-seeking on the other. As longstanding concerns with remaining obstacles to more mobility for workers, services, business entities and capital in recent years are aligned with post-Lisbon commitments to creating the Worlds leading competitive market, European corporate governance regulation [ECGR] has become exposed to and implicated in a set of highly dynamic regulatory experiments. In this context, New Governance offers itself as both tentative label and immodest proposal for a more responsive and innovative approach to European law making. The following paper assesses the recently emerging regulatory forms in ECGR as illustrations of far-reaching transformations in market governance. The arguable parallels between the EUs regulatory transformation in response to growing legitimacy concerns and the recurring question about whose interests a business corporation is intended to serve, provide the framework for an exploration of current regulatory trajectories in European corporate law that can most adequately be understood as a telling example of transnational legal pluralism.

Keywords: European Corporate Law, Legal Pluralism, New Governance, Experimentalist Governance, Transnational Law, Executive Compensation

JEL Classification: G34, K22, K33