European Union Agencies

This chapter investigates the difficulties which eu agencies face within a union in crisis. The institutional position of autonomous eu regulators has been challenged both in european law and within the coordination demands of a broader european crisis regime. At a deeper level, however, crisis has heightened underlying concerns about the appropriate place of autonomous governance institutions within the broader scheme of democratic politics and government. Similarly, mandate overload finds its counterpart in renewed calls for the enhanced legitimation of agency operation, a phenomenon which itself is claimed to undermine agency functionality. Autonomous agencies find themselves subjects of problems of accountability overload and of reputational risk. Finally, eu agencies are also implicated within a modern epistemological crisis which pitches a technocratic arm of administration against a rising tide of politics.