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Supranational Governance and Networked Accountability Structures: Member State Oversight of EU Agencies*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Johannes Saurer
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Extract

The most remarkable recent development in EU administrative law is the widespread establishment of European agencies. Beginning in the early 1990s, EU agencies emerged as significant actors in a number of areas, including trademark law, pharmaceutical licensing and aviation safety. EU agencies are best understood, however, not as autonomous regulators at the federal level, but as the most recent expression of European governance through administrative networks. The regulatory intertwining of supranational and national authorities in the EU is significantly different from the division of authority between federal and state bureaucracies in the United States federal system Hence, the accountability of European agencies to the EU and to Member States has unique features that can be traced to the dynamics of European integration. Accountability is largely a function of networked institutional relations that link European administrative entities to both supranational and national forums of accountability This article concentrates on the second form of accountability through an in-depth exploration of the way Member States oversee EU agencies. Oversight, here, covers monitoring, hearings, budgetary reviews or judicial actions, as well as procedural constraints.

Type
Articles
Information
European Journal of Risk Regulation , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 51 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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Footnotes

** Dr. iur., LL.M. (Yale), University of Bayreuth, Germany.
*

This article was first published in Comparative Administrative Law, ed. Susan Rose-Ackerman and Peter L. Lindseth (Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar, 2011). Permission to reprint courtesy of Edward Elgar Publishing.

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