Building Joint Capacity : The Role of European Union Agencies in the Management of Trans-Boundary Crises
This paper focuses on the growing role of European Union (EU) agencies in the management of trans-boundary crises. It makes this development explicit, demonstrating that the emergence of multiple agencies with specific crisis preparation or response tasks has transformed the EU’s crisis management arrangements and structures. By relying on both the literature on crisis management and EU agencies, the paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the existing (and evolving) multi-agency model, comparing it with a more centralized, singleagency model. It reflects on the role of EU agencies within the expanding contours of the EU’s emerging crisis capacity and the most appropriate way forward for effective and legitimate crisis management at the EU level, thus contributing to both the debate on the EU’s role in crisis management and the delegation of tasks to specialized EU agencies