To act or to react? – The European Environment Agency’s Priorities over Time

Agencies have many crucial roles in the European Union’s policymaking process. Some implement regulatory frameworks, for instance, by evaluating pharmaceutical products, while others contribute to policymaking, for instance, by identifying regulatory technical solutions for financial markets. Existing research focuses on EU agencies’ competencies and their interaction with the de jure and de facto interdependence and accountability of EU institutions, member states and stakeholders. While most studies that consider EU agencies’ actual work generally focus on how this affects their independence, there is little systematic research on EU agencies’ agenda-setting power and how the expertise they produce interacts with the EU’s policymaking processes. Due to their structural independence from other EU actors, EU agencies are – to different degrees – able to define their priorities and agendas. Against this backdrop, we seek to provide a first account of EU agencies’ substantial priorities over time. To this end, we analyze one of the oldest EU agencies, the European Environmental Agency (EEA), which is an archetypical information agency. At the heart of our analysis lies the question of how the EEA uses its discretion in setting its own reporting priorities. More precisely, we ask when the EEA pro-actively sets topics ahead of the EU’s overall environmental policy agenda and when it reacts to the Commission’s priorities. Empirically, we employ the EEA’s annual activity reports since its inception in 1993 to assess priorities and topical focus areas. We compare these with the Commission’s priorities and link them to the EU’s overall priorities, captured by the Environmental Action Programs. Analytically, we rely on a combination of automated text analysis and hand-coding of documents. The novelty of our approach lies in utilizing the activity reports for substantial instead of institutional questions. We show that the EEA largely follows the Commission and EU priorities. At the same time, it punctually sets its own agenda. For instance, the EEA and its associated domestic authorities preceded the EU-level focus on resource usage and recycling. Overall, our contribution is one of the first attempts to capture how EU agencies substantially use their legal independence and explain when they use it to develop an agenda aimed at preceding and preparing EU legislation and when their work focuses on re-actively supporting EU-level priorities.