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

Sarah Arras (SB OverSeas) & Caelesta Braun (Leiden University)

Over the past twenty years, EU agencies have proliferated as part of the Eurocracy. Notwithstanding their different tasks and varying competences, they tend to share a common feature: they engage closely with non-state stakeholders, including industry associations, trade unions and non-governmental organizations. In their article “Stakeholders wanted! Why and how European Union agencies involve non-state stakeholders” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Sarah Arras and Caelesta Braun note that although non-state stakeholder appear to assume an important role in EU agencies’ affairs, we know little about how EU agencies involve non-state stakeholders – or why agencies engage them in the first place. To address these questions, Sarah and Caelesta draw on a novel dataset of access instruments employed by EU agencies and a series of interviews with EU agency officials. Evidence from their analysis suggests that non-state stakeholder involvement not only responds to EU agencies’ demands, such as requests for expertise or attempts to shore up their organizational reputation, but also serves the European Parliament as an instrument of indirect control over the myriad of independent agencies. However, Sarah and Caelesta’s analysis also highlights “that rather than being independent and insulated from external pressures, as the idea of delegation to experts suggests, EU regulatory agencies are strongly embedded in a network of stakeholders”, risking a dependence on the regulated industry.