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An Organisational Perspective on Regulatory Capacity Building in the EU

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

Abstract

The chapter develops the analytical framework of the book. It suggests that an organisational perspective that is rooted in a bureaucratic politics approach can help us to understand variation in patterns of support of EU agencies’ work on part of national regulators, which previous literature is unable to do. The chapter suggests that national regulators support EU agencies’ work when they perceive this to add value to their core work by helping them to handle key regulatory challenges. Regulatory challenges are conceptualised as institutionally embedded in specific policy sectors and countries. To substantiate this empirically the study focuses on sectors and countries with varying regulatory challenges, namely, drug safety monitoring, maritime safety, food safety and banking regulation in the UK and Germany.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, the Latvian Financial and Capital Market Commission has 124 staff members (FKTK 2012, p. 66) and a budget of approximately €5,779,000 (ibid., p. 72). In comparison, the German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority (BaFin) has around 3200 staff members and a budget of approximately €224,000,000. The Czech pharmaceuticals regulator employs around 340 people and its annual budget is around €88,800,000 (SUKL 2013, p. 72f). The British equivalent, in turn, has a budget of around €144,000,000 (MHRA 2013, p. 66) and it has around 930 members of staff (ibid., p. 16). However, capacity is not best addressed in quantitative measures alone. Rather, it also crucial whether a given regulator is usually seen as highly expert and competent by its peers in the EU and beyond, and whether its actual performance –rather its potential– is realised (Nelissen 2002), p. 13). In the end, administrative capacity might differ across tasks within the same regulator and whether it exists always remains an empirical question.

  2. 2.

    Please note that while effort was made to cover as much of the stated time period through the selection interviewees, the full coverage of the period from the inception of EU agencies to the end of 2016 is based on the documentary analysis outlined above.

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Heims, E. (2019). An Organisational Perspective on Regulatory Capacity Building in the EU. In: Building EU Regulatory Capacity. Executive Politics and Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97577-1_2

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