Stakeholders wanted! Why and how European Union agencies involve non-state stakeholders

ABSTRACT

This article examines why and how European Union agencies involve non-state stakeholders – such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), business associations or trade unions – via three access instruments: public consultations; stakeholder bodies; and representation in management boards. We assess how the use of these instruments varies across agencies, and how they are linked to different motivations driving the demand for stakeholder participation. We present two alternative sets of hypotheses, first focusing on agencies’ need for information, organizational capacity and reputation, and second, considering stakeholder involvement as an instrument of legislative control. We draw on a new dataset of stakeholder involvement practices of the full population of EU agencies, compiled via document analysis and interviews. Our findings indicate that stakeholder involvement is a double-edged sword, contributing to agency accountability and control, but with an inevitable risk of dependence on the regulated industry.

KEYWORDS:

• Access
• agencies
• European Union
• interest groups
• stakeholders

Acknowledgements

We want to thank Jan Beyers, Iskander De Bruycker, the members of the research group on international governance from the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University, and the two anonymous JEPP reviewers for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Arras is a PhD researcher at the Antwerp Centre for Institutions and Multilevel politics (ACIM), at the Department of Political Science at the University of Antwerp.

Caelesta Braun is an associate professor at the Institute of Public Administration at Leiden University.

Notes

1. Authors’ own data source.

2. http://www.ema.europa.eu/ema/index.jsp?curl=pages/about_us/general/general_content_000098.jsp (accessed April 14, 2016).

3. http://www.eba.europa.eu/about-us/organisation/banking-stakeholder-group (accessed April 14, 2016).

4. Agencies established after the Lisbon Treaty entered into force (1 December 2009), fall under the ordinary legislative procedure.

5. The Single Resolution Board and the European Public Prosecutor’s Office are excluded, since they are not operational yet. The Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union is excluded, since a short telephone interview made clear that this agency is not involved in (the implementation of) EU legislation but is tasked with translation services for all other EU institutions.

6. https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/agencies/decentralised-agencies_en (accessed June 2, 2015).

7. https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/agencies/decentralised-agencies_en (accessed June 2, 2015).

8. The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the European GNSS Agency (GSA), the European Police College (CEPOL) and the European Union’s Judicial Co-operation Unit (EUROJUST).

9. Two agencies provided written answers after we had tried to schedule an interview several times without success.

10. Logistic regressions provided similar results. A logistic regression with public consultations as dependent variable was, however, problematic, since there are no observations for the categories ‘no codecision’ and ‘non-regulatory’ agencies. Codecision and agency competences are not correlated (χ² = 1.551, p = 0.213). We also included agency age and resources in the analysis, to control for a potential time trend and the expectation that agencies with more resources are better able to bear the costs of stakeholder involvement. The results show that management board representation is more likely for older agencies, while stakeholder bodies and public consultations occur more often at younger agencies. We did not find significant associations for agency budget. We also checked the associations between agency age, budget, competences and EP involvement. Only EP involvement and agency age are significantly correlated. This is not surprising, given that the EP was involved in the creation of the most recently established agencies.

Additional information

Funding

The research in this article is financially supported by grant G096512N from the Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Principal Investigator: Jan Beyers) and grant 452-14-012 from the Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (Principal Investigator: Caelesta Braun).