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Saurer, Johannes --- "Supranational Governance and Networked Accountability Structures: Member State Oversight of EU Agencies" [2010] ELECD 840; in Rose-Ackerman, Susan; Lindseth, L. Peter (eds), "Comparative Administrative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Comparative Administrative Law

Editor(s): Rose-Ackerman, Susan; Lindseth, L. Peter

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848446359

Section: Chapter 36

Section Title: Supranational Governance and Networked Accountability Structures: Member State Oversight of EU Agencies

Author(s): Saurer, Johannes

Number of pages: 14

Extract:

36 Supranational governance and networked
accountability structures: Member State oversight
of EU agencies
Johannes Saurer


The most remarkable recent development in EU administrative law is the widespread
establishment of European agencies. Beginning in the early 1990s, EU agencies emerged
as significant actors in a number of areas, including trademark law, pharmaceutical
licensing and aviation safety. EU agencies are best understood, however, not as autono-
mous regulators at the federal level, but as the most recent expression of European
governance through administrative networks. The regulatory intertwining of suprana-
tional and national authorities in the EU is significantly different from the division of
authority between federal and state bureaucracies in the United States federal system
(Peters 2006). Hence, the accountability of European agencies to the EU and to Member
States has unique features that can be traced to the dynamics of European integra-
tion. Accountability is largely a function of networked institutional relations that link
European administrative entities to both supranational and national forums of account-
ability (Hofmann 2008: 671, Vos 2005: 125 ff.). This chapter concentrates on the second
form of accountability through an in-depth exploration of the way Member States
oversee EU agencies. Oversight, here, covers monitoring, hearings, budgetary reviews or
judicial actions, as well as procedural constraints.1
Section 1 locates the EU agencies within the emerging networks of the EU administra-
tive sphere. Section 2 provides an overview of the unity and diversity of the accountabil-
ity architecture of the European agencies. Section 3 examines the oversight ...