Domestic images of EU agencies: Insight into the diverse domestic perceptions of how EU agencies improve compliance

Achieving a high level of compliance is a key factor in the effectiveness of European Union (EU) legislation. Non-compliance can potentially lead to serious problems (e.g. affecting efficiency, competitiveness or credibility) and even disasters. Agencies are increasingly used to tackle compliance problems in the EU. Starting with only two in the early 1990s – mushrooming to over 30 currently with a combined budget of more than 2,4 billion Euro in 2011 – agencies are expected to ‘improve the way rules are applied and enforced across the Union’ (CEC, 2001: 24). For example, in 1999 the Erika oil tanker sank off the coast of France, causing one of the greatest environmental disasters in the world. With the explicit aim to prevent such disasters, the EU created the European Maritime Safety Agency with the expectation that this agency would lead to better implementation of EU maritime safety rules. Having such an EU-wide solution to improve compliance at the domestic level is not obvious from the outset. We very well know from the increasing body of literature on implementation of and compliance with EU legislation, that domestic conditions matter. The EU member states differ in terms of economic, political, administrative, cultural, etc. background, and this influences the domestic responses to EU legislation. This paper aims to analyze how member states differently respond to EU-wide initiative to improve compliance with EU legislation. As a case study, it will examine how different member states perceive the working and functioning of EU agencies in the transport sector (the European Railway Agency, the European Maritime Agency and the European Aviation Safety Agency), as stimulators of domestic compliance with EU legislation. What does, or does not work, according to these domestic officials, and how and to what extent are EU agency officials taking domestic circumstances into consideration? The paper will resort to interviews with EU agency staff, and with representatives of the domestic counterparts of the EU transport agencies (e.g. the national railway authorities). As regulatory practices differ from country to country, six member states were selected that vary according to regulatory capacity (measured via the World Bank governance indicator ‘government effectiveness’; Kaufmann et al., 2010) and regulatory performance (measured via EU notification numbers and the World Bank indicator ‘rule of law’). The six selected countries are the Netherlands, Germany and the United Kingdom, as representatives of the group scoring high on both regulatory performance and capacity, and Italy, Poland and Hungary, as representatives scoring ‘medium’ on both indicators (the category ‘low’ does not exist in the EU according to the World Bank indicators). The first interviews lead to the tentative conclusion that domestic perceptions of how, when, and under what conditions EU agencies lead to better domestic compliance differ widely. Research into the European Railway Agency (ERA) reveals a clear difference between the two groups of countries. Generally speaking, countries with a lower regulatory capacity and performance are more positive about the role and influence of ERA in stimulating domestic compliance. This group values ERA’s role in stimulating domestic learning: ‘I could describe our relation as that between teacher and student. We are learning a lot from ERA’ (interview Polish railway agency, 3 August 2011). The group of countries with a higher regulatory capacity and performance is much more sceptical, whereby the EU agency is more perceived as ‘interfering’ with the domestic tradition. By means of conclusion, this paper aims to analyze how domestic conditions (and thus diversity) could and should be taken into consideration in EU-wide solutions to combat compliance problems.