Establishing separate executive bodies of a confederation or of a nascent federation of states seems in many respects to be the ‘hard case’ of institution-building. This article argues that ‘agencification’ at the EU level is basically about increasing the potential for more uniform...

This paper reports a comparative study of the Environmental Regulatory Agencies in Norway, Denmark and Finland. Increasingly and relatively independently these agencies are taking part in transnational networks in the EU involving the European Commission. A strong informal penetration, fuelled...

The European Commission has over the past years intensified its efforts to develop alternative and non-legal instruments for improving implementation in the member states. One specific instrument is networked administrative structures with national regulatory agencies , aiming to harmonize and...

The EU is gradually expanding its executive capacity through agencies, and some of the newcomers in the agency family have a larger regulatory potential than the previous ones. This paper analyses the genesis of the European Chemical Agency (ECHA), a newly born European regulatory agency....