Who implements the EU’s geoeconomic agenda?

Over the last five years, the EU has adopted a flurry of policies as part of its geoeconomic agenda. But a policy is only as good as its implementation. If we are to analyse the effectiveness of the EU as a nascent geoeconomic actor, it is crucial to understand who is to implement what parts of the policy. However, as the EU’s geoeconomic agenda cuts across policy domains that are both firmly supranational such as international trade or the internal market and at the same time highly intergovernmental like foreign policy or finance, its implementation is often governed through a complicated arrangement between member states and European Commission. Building on existing methods studying the delegation of implementing tasks in EU legislation, we code all major provisions of a sample of ten recent legislative acts covering both measures of outward oriented and inward oriented statecraft. To provide further insight into the nature of delegated tasks, we propose a novel functional typology for implementing tasks. Our findings can help unlock subsequent research into the (lack of) effectiveness of the EU’s and its underlying causes.