Who You Gonna Call?: Why Task Forces are Set Up Within EU Agencies

When confronted with heightened uncertainty, as in the case of transboundary crises, organizations seek to expand their knowledge base to support their decision-making. This knowledge input sought by decision-makers is essential in creating a knowledge base upon which crisis management measures are adopted, implemented, and reviewed. Within public organizations, this knowledge demand is translated into the establishment of additional structures for crisis management, generally referred to as task forces. These task forces might be more or less permanent, completely new or adapted from previous structures, and include political, expert, and/or civil society actors bringing to the table different knowledge types. While ample evidence has been gathered about crisis management structures at the national level in recent crises (e.g. Randma-Liiv et al., 2025), this paper sets its focus on the European level of governance and asks: what triggers the set-up of task forces for crisis management at the EU level? Starting with a mapping exercise through which such task forces are identified, the paper analyzes the mechanisms triggering the set-up through document analysis of legal and parliamentary records, triangulated with interviews. This paper thus makes a twofold contribution. On the one hand, its empirics contribute to filling a gap in the literature on knowledge management, where the functioning of interfaces such as task forces has not been explored as much as it was theoretically developed and categorized. On the other hand, this paper contributes to the EU regulatory governance literature at the intersection with crisis governance. Building on the political implications of agencies’ power expansions found in stakeholder engagement, it seems that while crisis task forces have been mostly analyzed and presented in the literature as answering a functional knowledge need, there is more to unfold regarding their set-up and structuring, revealing power dynamics among political principals.