Next to Member States, European Union (EU) level organisations have come to play a larger role in enforcement in the EU during the last two decades. Analysing the roles of Member States, networks of national authorities and EU agencies in this stage of the policy cycle through multiple academic lenses could lead to a more comprehensive understanding and assessment of their design. This article sets elementary steps towards a framework that brings together prominent theoretical insights from the legal and political disciplines, to discuss their combined leverage for understanding the EU legislator's choice for these enforcement regimes.

Some EU agencies have been recently entrusted with enforcement powers, which imply a crucial extension of their regulatory reach. However, other comparable agencies did not receive such powers. This paper explores the case of energy regulation as an instance of these “negative” cases, and suggests that the lack of enforcement powers may have been partially determined by business interest groups. To illustrate this argument, this article firstly relies on official documentation to show that key interest groups were consistently opposed to the option of granting enforcement powers to the EU agency in charge (ACER). Secondly, it is suggested that these interest groups, which have been largely incorporated in regulatory networks during the prehistory of the agency, had access to, and exerted influence in, the governance of EU energy policy, and could plausibly have been able to concretise their preferences. A systematic examination of the representation of interest groups in the European network of energy regulators (CEER/ERGEG) during the period 2004–2011 is undertaken to corroborate this point. The conclusion draws attention to the fact that, although interest groups are less visible than other actors and their presence is less formalised, they could be very influential on decision-making processes within European networks and agencies.

European Administrative Networks are expected to strengthen the national enforcement of European legislation. The idea is that these networks organise national civil servants, and allow them to exchange best practices, negotiate guidelines and develop inventive solutions to common challenges faced during the implementation and enforcement of European Union regulations. This paper proposes a framework to evaluate European Administrative Networks on their potential to spur collaborative innovation concerning national enforcement of this common regulation. The framework is then applied to a particular network, the European Network for Prosecutors of the Environment. Results show that this network can be considered a resource for collaborative innovation.

Enforcement of the European System of Financial Supervision (ESFS) has undergone a three-step process over time, leading it to a current networked configuration of powers and tasks between the EU and the national competent authorities (NCAs). In light of this, this paper has a twofold aim. First, it analyses the actual configuration of enforcement mechanisms in the ESFS, arguing that different patterns emerge across the three branches (banks, securities markets and insurance): as governance becomes more complex in terms of number of actors and functions, verticalisation of enforcement increases. Second, by taking into account the three Italian competent authorities, it assesses the concrete changes occurred both in organisation and in perceived effectiveness, through quantitative data and qualitative surveys. It therefore argues that the more institutionalised and verticalised is the enforcement governance, the less reluctant will NCAs be to transfer shares of their enforcing powers to the EU level and to change their practices and organisational structures concretely, according to harmonisation requirements by the European supervisory authorities and the European Central Bank.

The Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) is one of the ever-increasing policy areas that have witnessed the creation of forms of “networked enforcement”, meaning enforcement structures in which several national and EU authorities cooperate. Amongst those are a number of legal requirements and applications for sharing data on fisheries between national and European competent authorities. This form of networked enforcement casts some questions as regards the existence of corresponding accountability mechanisms, which serve to legitimate the enforcement activities in the CFP. The aim of this paper is to examine the networked enforcement mechanisms arising from the CFP, with a special focus on the data-sharing activities and the role of European Fisheries Control Agency as pivotal to the cooperation between national authorities, with a view to assessing the gaps of accountability arising from them, and analysing the possible alternative ways to provide the enforcement phase with legitimacy.

In order to address “wicked problems”, complex, multi-level governance structures must be established. These structures in turn require sophisticated systems of controls over public power to safeguard the rule of law. This seems to have been ignored in EU legislative practice and relevant research. This article argues that future research and legislative design of controls over public power in the EU need to be guided by the principle of connecting, aligning and making interplay between relevant concepts, institutions, procedures and scopes of different types of control belonging to the many jurisdictions, whose actors are involved in the executing of (shared) tasks in the EU. Connecting the disciplines that study these issues is a necessary prerequisite to this endeavour.

Even though carbon pricing is widely accepted as the most efficient policy instrument for climate change mitigation, it has been severely held back by a lack of public support. Building on research in behavioural sciences, we propose a revenue recycling scheme that aims to foster public support for carbon taxes. The scheme has two main strengths: (i) it may allow the implementatin of carbon taxes with higher tax rates than those currently prevailing in most jurisdictions; (ii) it relies on a number of accessible technologies, and thus it can be implemented in a wide variety of settings, both in urban and rural areas of developing and developed countries.

In the aftermath of the Technical Board of Appeal’s decision T 1063/18 of 5 December 2018 (“the Pepper case”), the President of the EPO has referred, in G 3/19, two questions to the Enlarged Board of Appeal pursuant to Article 112(1)(b) of the European Patent Convention concerning the patentability of products obtained from essentially biological processes under Article 53(b) EPC. The Technical Board of Appeals in T 1063/18 upheld that the new Rule 28(2) of the Implementing Regulations to the European Patent Convention conflicts with Article 53(b) EPC, as it has been interpreted by the Enlarged Board of Appeal in G 2/12 and G 2/13 (the “Tomato II” and “Broccoli II” cases), namely that “the exclusion of essentially biological processes for the production of plants in Article 53(b) EPC does not have a negative effect on the allowability of a product claim directed to plants or plants material such as fruit”. Moreover, the TBA concluded that Article 58(b) EPC should prevail over Rule 28(2) EPC-IR. Since this ruling challenges the Administrative Council’s amendment to Rule 28 EPC-IR, the President deemed it necessary to refer the conflict to the EBA in order to “restore legal certainty”.