REFGOV - Reflexive Governance in the Public Interest

6th European Framework programme Integrated Project - CIT3-513420. The integrated project REFGOV counts 29 partner-institutions and is coordinated by the Centre for Philosophy of Law - Centre de Philosophie du Droit ( CPDR ) of the Catholic University of Louvain ( Louvain-La-Neuve ). This research focuses on emerging institutional mechanisms which seek to answer the question of market failures by means other than command-and-control regulation imposed in the name of the public interest. It seeks to identify these new mechanisms, to evaluate them and to make institutional proposals for an improved form of governance. The approach means to highlight two categories of insufficiency: insufficiency in the governance devices and insufficiency in the theoretical models currently available to address the former. It aims therefore to synthesize the achievements of the current interdisciplinary research and set up an interaction not only between the most advanced questions of Economics, Law, Political Science, but also between those questions and the Theory of Action related to the public interest governance. Beyond that, it will push forward the research on collective action and seek to build the theoretical tools required to address the remaining insufficiencies, upon the hypothesis that such improvements depend on the better construction of the preconditions of the collective learning process, which conditions the efficiency of any collective action.