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KAEDING Michael - The Role of EU Agencies as Policy Entrepreneurs in Decentralizing EU Governance (25h)
Professor Micheal Kaeding
Academic Assistant Sara Maria Barbaglia
European agencies have become increasingly important features in EU decision-making, being arguably one of the most prominent institutional innovations at the EU level in recent history. They aim to provide expert advice independent of political or economic considerations. This Optional Course assesses whether and under what conditions EU agencies comply with this scientific mandate. How are EU agencies created in the first place, are they formally independent, and do they also behave autonomously in practice? How does actual autonomy vary across EU agencies and how does this affect the role these agencies play in the multi-level system of European governance? And, whether the advent of EU agencies tends to underpin a basically intergovernmental, transnational or supranational order has potentially huge consequences for the distribution of power across levels of government, for the degree of policy uniformity and pooling of administrative resources across countries, for the role of genuinely European perspectives in the policy process, and for accountability relations. Since the jury is still out on most topics, this Optional Course will offer answers to many of the unresolved answers by addressing these questions theoretically and empirically comparing various EU agencies and providing also an excellent opportunity for developing those ideas further into a MA thesis project.