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

Agencies have many crucial roles in the EU’s policymaking process. They provide information, implement regulatory frameworks or prepare regulatory decisions. While most studies that consider EU agencies’ actual work generally focus on how this affects their independence, there is little 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. For this, 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 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 to assess priorities and topical focus areas. We compare these with the Commission’s priorities and link them to the EU’s overall priorities. Analytically, we rely on a combination of automated text analysis and hand-coding of documents. 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.