Conclusions: empirical findings and experimentalist pathways

This chapter reviews the book’s empirical findings and analyses their implications for the relationship between the development of experimentalist governance within and beyond the EU. Its findings provide substantial evidence for both positive and negative views of the EU’s contribution to transnational experimentalism, as well as for the conditions for each, and the ways these effects are produced. The evidence shows that the EU is most successful in promoting transnational experimentalism to third countries through ‘horizontal’ channels: unilateral, bilateral, and occasionally plurilateral. By contrast, the book’s findings suggest that the EU is typically less successful in uploading its internal experimentalist governance processes to international organizations and multilateral bodies through ‘vertical’ channels. But the book also shows that the EU’s unilateral efforts to extend experimentalist governance horizontally often interact in complex, mutually supportive ways with multilateral institutions, thereby contributing to the development of promising hybrid pathways towards transnational experimentalism.