When governments delegate functions to agencies, they seek to manage this relationship so that the risks of opportunism are controlled while the benefits of agency autonomy are not undermined. The US-inspired theory underlying this contention is now being refined in the European context, often with coalition governments and differing political cultures (Verhoest et al 2010). We provide a further building block by using data from Belgium, the Netherlands and the UK to explore the relationship between two factors. We test the assumption of a unitary principal (usually the ministry) by examining whether the principal is better understood as a network of actors. We then identify the formal and informal mechanisms that connect the agency and the principal. We then use case studies to examine how the actors and mechanisms are mobilised when issues of political saliency come to the fore, and how this is justified in terms of agency framing.
