Marius-Jan Radlo ability to assess progress of reforms as well as to present detailed national recommendations on what and/or how to reform. The monitoring system was equipped with an informal sanction system based on peer pressure created by a set of short-listed comparable economic indicators playing the role of official scoreboard, a national reporting system and the Commission's recommendations, as well as on an official review of the implementation process to be done by the March European Council. All the above mechanisms are aimed at strengthening national ownership of the Lisbon Process and forcing national governments to implement necessary reforms. All the same, economic reform governance in the EU still has quite clear limits, especially if we take into account its ability to foster structural reforms. These usually take time, and often cause short-term costs that inhibit consistent policy and are politically unpopular. In such a perspective a crucial question is whether new supranational reform coordination measures are able to influence governments more than their internal political, social and economic environment. From this perspective, the prospects for the relaunched Lisbon Strategy are not optimistic. The rationale for Lisbon as a coordination process is still poorly articulated and until the conditions in a member state are conducive to reform, the likelihood of rapid progress will be very limited. Some comfort can be taken from the very fact that there is such diverse experience across Europe in trajectories of structural change, as it shows that good strategic policy choices can make a difference, with the smaller countries generally in the lead. Moreover, diversity affords the opportunity for one country to learn from another and thus to develop new solutions. Above scepticism was partially confirmed when analysing selected NRPs. These show considerable diversity in a number of respects(Radlo and Bates, 2006). What all these observations suggest is that it will be difficult to raise the importance of the Lisbon Strategy in national political debate. As a consequence, the expectation that national accountability mechanisms will provide an incentive to governments to pursue hard choices may prove to be exaggerated. All the above lead us to the conclusion that we should not be too overly optimistic regarding the ability of the new economic reform coordination system to produce the results it promises. Again it becomes obvious that forcing governments to implement painful reforms can be very difficult. 86