EU agency stakeholder committee establishment and design

EU agencies could contribute to EU regulation and implementation, but rely on national agencies, experts, and organised interests for carrying out their work. Researchers have examined the impact of relations with public authorities on EU agencies’ functioning and autonomy. However, less attention has been given to relations with non-state organised actors, despite the broader regulatory and interest group literature highlighting the promises and pitfalls of such relations for bureaucratic autonomy and for how public authorities carry out their work. Advisory committees could help public agencies reduce the risk of bias and capture from such relations, by diversifying who is granted access. However, advisory committees may be used for various purposes, including legislator steering, autonomy-building by the agency, or lobbyism by interest groups. The presence of advisory structures can thus not be interpreted as signifying one or the other without closer scrutiny. This applies especially for EU agencies, whose advisory committees are mostly weakly regulated by the legislator, while EU agencies’ late emergence in already densely populated regulatory fields begs the question of the extent to which the use of agency discretion is fully autonomous. A case in point is the EU energy agency ACER, whose establishment and design of three European Stakeholder Committees is examined in this paper. The analysis shows that this EU agency sought to enhance its bureaucratic autonomy by means of these advisory committees, but that its discretion was constrained by factors beyond legislator steering. Further research should explore whether this applies beyond the current case.