EU agencies’ stakeholder bodies: vehicles of enhanced control, legitimacy or bias?

Abstract

EU agencies are increasingly subject to a flurry of stakeholder bodies. Despite their prevalence, and the considerable variation in structures formally professed to serve the same purpose, we know little about the actor preferences driving the set-up of such structures or the potential implications of specific institutional design choices. We systematically map structural variations across EU agencies and analyse to what extent the establishment and the design of stakeholder bodies is principal-imposed or agency-initiated. Do stakeholder structures enhance political control serving to broadly legitimise agencies, or to the contrary, do they reflect preferences of the bureaucratic actors they are meant to control, and with what implications? We find that, for the most part, weak principal control and steering leaves it to the agencies themselves to design stakeholder bodies as they see fit. This has the potential to introduce unsanctioned biases in favour of specific groups, potentially depleting rather than bolstering legitimacy. A major implication of EU agencies' stakeholder engagement is that the agency model is currently in flux, moving away from the classic insulated agency towards greater politicization in regulatory policy.

Stakeholder engagement as a conduit for regulatory legitimacy?

“…As research has shown, stakeholder engagement practices often do not yield the balanced engagement or facilitate a voice for the 'public interest' they were intended to do. For instance, in a recent study Busuioc and Jevnaker (2020) find that in the absence of legislator guidance, EU agencies have embraced very different engagement models for their stakeholder committees: some opting for narrow interest representation, while others having attempted to bypass 'thorny' issues of representation altogether by being 'open to all'. Such variation of stakeholder engagement across EU agencies is in line with other studies (Arras & Braun, 2018;Borrás et al, 2007;Perez Duran, 2018) and raises crucial questions as to their eventual effect.…”

“…As contributions in this special issue demonstrate, the regulatory state is undergoing a move towards the 'responsive' rather than the 'responsible' regulatory state (Koop & Lodge, 2020), 'a shift away from the model of strictly economic, de-politicised regulation' (Haber & Heims, 2020). This is an emerging feature of the regulatory state diagnosed in this special issue as well as elsewhere: Heims and Lodge (2018), documenting a move towards customer engagement, for instance, speak of a shift to the 'collaborative regulatory state' in the UK context, while Busuioc and Jevnaker (2020) studying EU agency stakeholder committees, diagnose a general shift towards greater politicization in the EU regulatory state: 'Under a combination of legislator-engendered ambiguity and agency-driven initiatives, a whole range of core agency activities and key agency structures have been opened up to societal and interest group input' (Busuioc & Jevnaker, 2020).…”

“…For instance, through their 'deck-stacking' function stakeholder engagement arrangements can serve as powerful mechanisms of political control and thereby as legitimizing devices (Arras & Braun, 2018;Kelemen, 2002;McCubbins et al, 1987). However, when the (EU) legislator nominally mandates such bodies yet omits for a large part to actually structure and steer their composition and design (Busuioc & Jevnaker, 2020), the critical legitimizing link (to political control) becomes lost.…”

“…Thus, depending on the chosen theoretical lens, stakeholder engagement is both a vehicle of expert input and legitimationthat can allay democratic deficit concerns, bolster accountability and serve as key resource of informal regulatory authority-as well as a potential source of capture and bias, and hence de-legitimation, in regulation (Arras & Braun, 2018;Busuioc & Jevnaker, 2020). Like 'Schrödinger's cat' (both dead and alive), engagement is simultaneously both a source of legitimation and de-legitimation in regulatory governance.…”

Reputation‐SourcedAuthority and the Prospect of Unchecked Bureaucratic Power

“…Customer engagement, stakeholder involvement, and “collaborative regulation” are the noms du jour in regulatory practice (Heims and Lodge 2018). A whole host of bureaucratic agencies in the US and European contexts are found to engage in accountability‐seeking behavior (e.g., Busuioc 2010; Karsten 2015; Koop 2014; Magill 2009; Reiss 2011) as well as a variety of stakeholder engagement and entrepreneurial activities (Arras and Braun 2018; Busuioc and Jevnaker 2020; Braun and Busuioc 2020; Wood 2018). In this context, it becomes increasingly important to study the extent to which these new practices enhance or detract from existing formal controls.…”