Coordination Capacities of EU Agencies in Transboundary Crises: Leading or Following the Crowd?

The transboundary nature of the different crises the EU faces requires a clear leadership in their management and resolution. In this sense, EU agencies have emerged as a repository of plausible mechanisms to react to crises in different policy domains (e.g. finance, public health, or security, among others). They are capable of creating narratives and diagnoses that, for example, facilitate agreements among the actors involved. Agencies’ leadership may contribute to coordinating a wide array of actors; however, their scope of action in crisis moments is still a question to discern. Against this backdrop, the present article explores the coordination capacities EU agencies develop when confronted with transboundary crises. We locate the coordinating role of EU agencies in a continuum between network and agency-led models and discuss the factors having a major influence on this role. Our analysis is developed through the study of four transboundary crises that occurred in policy areas with different levels of EU responsibility. Our cases are: (1) the 2012 Banking Crisis and the role of the European Banking Authority (EBA); (2) the 2011 E. coli outbreak in several EU countries and the role of the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA); (3) the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sub-Saharan Africa and the role of the European Centre for Disease Control (ECDC); and finally, (4) the 2015 refugee crisis in the Mediterranean Sea and the role of Frontex. In the end, we identify a general pattern of EU agencies to operate as “coordinating cushions” within the complex European-wide institutional architecture. We suggest that they are most capable than any other entity to absorb the tensions between different principals in the response to transboundary crises, while we discuss the extent factors such as available resources, EU responsibilities in the policy area or agency independence affect such coordinating capacities.