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Building EU Regulatory Capacity pp 1–26Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Regulatory Capacity Building

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Part of the book series: Executive Politics and Governance ((EXPOLGOV))

Abstract

The chapter discusses European Union (EU) regulatory capacity building in the context of a mismatch between rule-making authority and administrative capacity at the EU-level. EU agencies, created to tackle this mismatch, are in fact symptomatic of the EU’s capacity gap: they have key regulatory responsibilities, but have miniscule resources. They are nevertheless able to fulfil their tasks because staff from national authorities proactively support them in their work, for example by supplying their staff to sit on the scientific panels and working groups of EU agencies. From a bureaucratic politics angle, this is surprising, given that we would expect any regulator to guard its turf, rather than to provide ‘life support’ to agencies that could possibly replace them. The chapter thus argues that the crux to understanding how EU regulatory capacity is built is to address the question why national regulators proactively support EU agencies in their work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Please note that these agencies do not take legally binding decisions. Rather, the European Commission decides on the basis of these scientific opinions. This is so because powers cannot be fully delegated to specialised EU regulatory bodies. If, for example, and EU agency has the task to authorise products for the market—such as the European Medicines Agency—the European Commission remains formally in charge of authorisation on the basis of an expert opinion of the specialised agency. This is a result of the so-called Meroni doctrine established in case law: It does not allow for a delegation of decision-making powers to independent EU agencies in order to keep the ‘institutional balance’ between EU institutions intact (Meroni SpA v ECSC High Authority (Meroni I) [1957 and 1958] E.C.R. Spec. Ed. 133, and Meroni SpA v ECSC High Authority (Meroni II) (10/56) [1957 and 1958] E.C.R. Spec. Ed. 157). For further commentary see, for example, Griller and Orator (2010). Recently the European Court of Justice seems to have lifted these restrictions on agencies. The consequences of this ruling are unclear at the time of writing. For an analysis (see Chamon 2014). In practice, the European Commission generally ‘rubber-stamps’ the decisions of EU regulatory bodies.

  2. 2.

    Financial contributions are attached to the so-called ‘Focal Point Agreements’ that EFSA concludes with each national authority individually. These payments, however, do not have an official legal base and remain informal in character (EFSA 2013b, p.16ff).

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  1. Department of Politics, University of York, York, UK

    Eva Heims

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Heims, E. (2019). Regulatory Capacity Building. In: Building EU Regulatory Capacity. Executive Politics and Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97577-1_1

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