National Authorities in EU Agencies’ Governance Structures

The 38 decentralised EU agencies are a core component of the European administrative space. EU agencies perform very different tasks, including preparing regulatory decisions, recommending the authorisation of products, supervising implementation and gathering information for EU policy-making. National officials likewise contribute in different ways to EU agencies. They influence EU agencies’ work on management boards, but also in working groups, networks and joint operations. This paper systematically maps both the differences in EU agencies’ formal competences and the embeddedness of national authorities in their governance set-ups. For this, the paper, first, presents a fourfold classification of all EU agencies along tasks on the basis of their founding regulation. Second, it measures national authorities’ role through an index of three further provisions from founding regulations: The influence of national representatives on management boards, their involvement through formal networks in EU agencies’ day-to-day work and their strength vis-à-vis other actors such as the Commission and stakeholders. The measurements indicate that functional criteria shape the governance set-up delegators create: We find differences in the formal embeddedness of national representatives across the four task types. Thereby, the paper does not only complement measures of EU agencies’ relations with EU institutions by looking at their links to the member state level, but also sheds light on the formal difference in multi-level relationships along functional lines.