Under the name "new governance" the EU is actually working out its new agenda. Simon Hix has already in 1998 defined the EU as: "not [being] a state, but is a unique system of on-hierarchical, regulatory and deliberative governance (Hix 1998). He thus emphasizes the informal nature of the policy process, the non-hierarchical structure of the institutions and the non-redistributive nature of policy outputs. At the same time, this understanding does not view politics and government in the EU as 'not inherently different to any democratic political systems.

One can broadly say that starting from conferral of powers on the EU, and the classes of powers that can be conferred, governance embraces exercise of powers, sources of powers, limits to powers, the principle of subsidiarity, the principle of proportionality, state participation, comitology, enhanced co-operation, but also less direct forms of governance that are called new forms of governance - the open method of coordination, better regulation, harmonization, the „New-Style” directives, to name some.

The new forms of European governance have been expected to apply to the administrative and political chain extending all the way from “Brussels” to the grass roots.

GOVERNANCE POST-LISBON

Differently from the 2001 White Paper on Governance, the task of EU agenda-setting now belongs to the European Council, whose task is to provide the necessary impetus and political guidelines for the development of the EU. The Lisbon Treaty gave the European Council more prescriptive agenda-setting powers, and provided more detailed mechanisms for realizing those. Damian Chalmers has written that the European Council is therefore no longer confined to setting out guidelines for the EU, but is now defining its directions and priorities (Damian Chalmers, Giorgio Monti. European Union Law. Updating Supplement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, p. 20). Article 15 (1) TEU states: "1. The European Council shall provide the Union with the necessary impetus for its development and shall define the general political directions and priorities thereof. It shall not exercise legislative functions". The European Council cooperates with Member States (in different Council configurations), and the other EU institutions in agenda-setting.

The European Council's agenda-setting is limited by the final sentence, meaning that the European Council is not trespassing the Commission's legislative initiative - the European Council, according to Article 15 (1) TEU, is not supposed to exercise legislative functions, which indicates that the legislative initiation, as well as related to that initiation functions, remain to the European Commission, who is also considered as an agenda-setter in the EU, setting out the points on what the parliaments (European Parliament, as well as the national Parliaments) will vote later.