This final chapter offers a reflective account of the ethnographic journey behind this study of the Brussels Bubble and its digital transformation. Beginning in 2018, the research combined immersive fieldwork – including over fifteen trips to Brussels – and remote engagement with EU communications, newsletters and local media. The authors employed interpretive, qualitative methods, conducting more than a hundred interviews with diplomats, officials, interpreters and journalists. Using techniques like ordinary language interviews and the ‘interview to the double’, they captured not just what participants said, but how they experienced their digital and diplomatic worlds.

Ethnographic observation was central, from casual café meetings to high-level Council sessions, with fieldnotes documenting settings, interactions and the omnipresence of digital devices. The unexpected onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 became a pivotal ‘tragic serendipity’, forcing both the Brussels Bubble and the researchers to adapt to a digital ‘new normal’. The resulting data – over 1,000 pages of fieldnotes and thousands of archived newsletters – were coded thematically, revealing patterns in how technology reshapes EU governance.

The chapter underscores the challenges of access, anonymisation and balancing immersion with critical distance. Ultimately, it presents the book as a snapshot of a moment in EU politics, inviting further ethnographic exploration of digitalisation’s impact on diplomacy and global governance.

Chapter 4 examines the ways that transnational regulatory regimes are organized and governed. It also explores how the tension explored in Chapter 3 between a functional concern for efficacy and a functional concern for interest balancing finds resonance in a tension between a regime adopting a more exclusivist form of governance called the ‘club model’ or a more inclusive form of governance the chapter refers to as the ‘pluralist model’ – with the pluralist model being further divided into a more hierarchical form called the multi-stakeholder initiative, and a more decentralized form called networks. All have their own set of comparative advantages and disadvantages. Also explored is how the interaction between these two models of governance, on the one hand, and the two kinds of regulatory functions explored in Chapter 3, on the other, can give rise to issues of ‘operational legitimacy’. Finally, Chapter 4 investigates efforts to constrain possible abuses of power by transnational governance regimes, much like public law works to constrain possible abused of power by domestic governments. These efforts are generally referred to as ‘global administrative law’.