Focusing on the role of interest representation in EU policy-making, this paper investigates how experimentalist governance arrangements affect lobby groups’ strategies for influencing policy outcome. This emerging NMG not only builds extensively on input from ‘lower level units’ – including civil society actors – but more distinctively, functions through recursive revision of goals and means based on exchange of experiences from different local contexts. As such, from a deliberative perspective, interest groups representing affected constituencies could contribute to both effective and legitimate policy-making, whereas flawed or biased representation may undermine both. A comparative case study with one de novo, and one more established (quasi-)experimentalist regime, shows how interest groups respond to changing governance environments. The first case concerns a Directive on combating sexual abuse of children, involving extensive Member State discretion, while the Industrial Emissions Directive, working with context-dependent and periodically reviewed ‘Best Available Techniques’ forms the quasi-experimentalist case.
