Inter-institutional re-balancing in the implementation stage: the rise of Council implementing powers

The proposed paper analyses a significant yet underexplored development in the post-Lisbon evolution of EU governance: the re-emergence of the Council of the European Union as an implementing actor. Although the introduction of Articles 290–291 TFEU by the Lisbon Treaty was intended to consolidate executive implementation within the Commission and reduce intervention by the Council to implementing EU legislation in “duly justified cases”, successive waves of crisis-driven policymaking have created the political conditions in which the Council intermittently regains implementing authority. These empowerments, accompanied by new roles for the European Parliament in the execution of Council's implementing powers, point to deeper, systemic adjustments in the EU’s institutional balance. These adjustments extend beyond individual files and point to broader trends in (a) EU executive governance and (b) EU legislative negotiations over the subsequent executive governance. Drawing both from institutional power politics and principal-agent approaches, and from law- in-context legal methodology, this interdisciplinary analysis employs a systematic content analysis and document-based process tracing of a dataset containing all post-Lisbon legislative acts with provisions for Council's adoption of implementing acts, and trace the trajectory of these exceptional provisions from Commission proposals, through European Parliament’s Committee reports, to Council negotiations and Presidency compromise texts. The analysis examines three dimensions: (1) shifts in the allocation of implementing authority during the legislative process; (2) the nature and discretion of the Council’s implementing empowerments; and (3) the governance structures devised to regulate the Council’s exercise of these powers, demonstrating the EP's success in legislative negotiations. Taken together, these elements reveal how institutional actors recalibrate executive authority under pressure, and how crisis-induced preferences shape the micro-level architecture of EU legislation. The preliminary conclusions point to two systemic effects. First, the Commission loses implementing prerogatives in these files. This suggests a subtle weakening of the supranational executive body in politically salient areas. Second, the European Parliament, though generally aligned with the Commission in favour of supranational implementation, uses the reallocation of power to the Council as leverage to secure additional scrutiny or supervisory capacities, strengthening its institutional position in ways that are not foreseen under the existing Treaty rules and the Regulation 182/2011. These findings indicate that crisis-driven legislative dynamics can produce lasting shifts in the distribution of executive power within the EU. Council implementing acts thus serve as indicators of a broader pattern: the gradual reconfiguration of the EU’s institutional machinery through limited adjustments that cumulatively reshape the architecture of EU governance.