EU Agencies’ Impact on Administrative Decision Behaviour in the Commission

The establishment of EU agencies could impact how the Commission carries out its work, having access to an administrative ‘partner’ or ‘daughter’, often with more specialized expertise. Usually set up to support the Commission’s work on implementing EU legislation, they may be formally drawn into Commission-led processes. Moreover, EU agencies may provide advisory input that is of relevance to the making of new legislative proposals. However, we still know little of how EU agencies affect position-formation within the Commission. Do Commission-internal processes differ depending on whether a procedure include (prior) involvement of an EU agency? Have internal processes for decision-making (cf. Hartlapp et al 2014) taken into account formal or informal involvement of an EU agency? This paper asks whether or not the Commission has adjusted its administrative decision behaviour due to the presence of an EU agency within the energy sector (ACER). To the extent that mutual adjustments between the Commission and an EU agency come in the shape of a division of labour, this could mirror the relationship found nationally between ministries and agencies (cf. ‘normalization’, Wille 2013). Indicators of this could be clear patterns of differentiation in tasks and staff recruitment between the two organizations, with the Commission directing its attention more towards the strategic and political aspects of regulation and recruiting staff with more generalist competence (cf. Kassim et al 2013), while more specialized technical tasks and staff to be found in the agency. However, the energy sector has traditionally been seen as a hard case for integration, making ‘normalization’ less likely. Moreover, should the Commission rely more on the resources (expertise) of an EU agency, this could enable the Commission to focus on the more political aspects of EU legislation, but could potentially also reduce the scope for the use of expert working groups.