ABSTRACT
Agencies are important instruments of European governance. The European Union (EU) itself differentiates between four main types of agencies: agencies under Common Security and Defense Policy, EURATOM agencies and bodies, executive agencies (set up for a limited period by the European Commission to help manage EU programs), and decentralized agencies. This chapter focuses on this last type, i.e. agencies set up for an indefinite period and aimed at supporting the EU institutions in the elaboration and implementation of EU policies. These are defined as “EU level public authorities with a legal personality and a certain degree of organizational and financial autonomy that are created by acts of secondary legislation in order to perform clearly specific tasks” (Kelemen and Tarrant 2011, 929). Based on these characteristics they are classified as independent structures. However, some authors consider them as “semi-autonomous”, given that they receive funding directly from the EU budget and are subject to supervision of the Commission – and indirectly of the European Parliament (EP) through budget control (Andoura and Timmerman 2008). Agencies’ existence is justified either by the need to perform tasks of technical nature or to manage an issue within the framework of European competences. With transfer of competences to the EU, by 2014 there were over 30 independent EU agencies active in highly specialized sectors, including gender equality. Academic literature devotes increasing attention to EU agencies (Trivino and Jordana 2016). In general, it is important to remember that agencies are an integral part of the administrative network of the EU, which marks an important difference from non-governmental organizations such as the European Women’s Lobby (EWL), or expert groups such as the European Equality Law Network, which are not part of the EU’s administrative constellation.
