The Agencification of EU Research Policy

Together with the massive extension of EU research funding over the past two decades, the European Commission has implemented an ambitious organisational structure of executive agencies. According to official statements, these new entities have been important for achieving three goals. They help to reduce administrative costs by using cheaper workforce for programs that require the particularly intensive use of human resources. Secondly, they are also flexible organisational tools, being easily re-focused and re-programmed. Third, outsourcing allows the Commission Services to focus on their immediate tasks, that is, policy formulation and monitoring of implementation. Most EU executive agencies are engaged in distributing funds in programs under the heading of competitiveness, which are mostly set up to allocate public funds to projects regarding research and development. In other words, the EU R&D funding activities have seen massive agencification processes. These processes, open up a set of questions: are the EU executive agencies merely recipients of orders by their parental Commission services, or whether they manage to gain independence, and if so, to which degree? What do tight and formalistic procedures of guiding, auditing and supervising the financial behaviour of executive agencies sufficient achieve? What role do executive agencies play with national administrative agencies and ministries, and how do they relate to the other European institutions? Since EU executive agencies are mostly unrecognised by scholars of agencification as well as research policy, this paper is an attempt to provide initial answers to those questions and wants to point out further directions of inquiry.