European Union Decision-making in Times of Crisis: The Use of Delegated Powers

Abstract

The European Union’s instruments for implementing legislation were fundamentally transformed with the introduction of delegated acts in the Lisbon Treaty. Resulting from decades of inter-institutional tensions about the control and scrutiny of the European Commission’s use of these delegated powers, the new treaty provisions nevertheless gave rise to further debates about delineation of authority between Commission, Council and Parliament. The decade of crisis-management following the coming into force of the Lisbon Treaty, and the need to use delegated powers also in the context of responding to the Covid-19 pandemic, have raised additional questions. The proposed papers in this panel address various aspects of this problematic: the questions arising for the use of delegated powers from the 2016 Inter-institutional Agreement on Better Law-making, the issues related to the implementation of the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility, and the growing challenge for democratic oversight of powers delegated not only to the European Commission, but also to the Council. Together, the papers in this panel provide a comprehensive assessment of the manner in which the use of delegated powers in the EU has evolved in recent years.

Title	Details
Empowering and controlling the Commission after the 2016 Interinstitutional Agreement on Better Law-making	View Paper Details
Institutional design at the service of intergovernmental political control? The governance of the Recovery and Resilience Facility	View Paper Details
Between normalcy and emergency: the use of delegated and implementing acts during crises	View Paper Details