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Scott, Colin; Maher, Imelda --- "Four meta-doctrines of regulatory accountability in the European Union" [2017] ELECD 423; in Harlow, Carol; Leino, Päivi; della Cananea, Giacinto (eds), "Research Handbook on EU Administrative Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 263

Book Title: Research Handbook on EU Administrative Law

Editor(s): Harlow, Carol; Leino, Päivi; della Cananea, Giacinto

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781784710675

Section: Chapter 11

Section Title: Four meta-doctrines of regulatory accountability in the European Union

Author(s): Scott, Colin; Maher, Imelda

Number of pages: 29

Abstract/Description:

Since its inception in 1957 much of the activity of the European Union institutions has been concerned with seeking to change behaviour through setting down rules targeted at reducing or eliminating barriers to movement for capital, goods, people and services. In many cases such rules address the differences in the domestic regulatory regimes of the Member States. When the emergent interdisciplinary field of regulation began to catch up with the activities of the EU in the 1990s this supranational order was clearly ripe for regulatory analyses which examined such issues as the development of regulatory agencies, the processes and content of regulatory rule-making, implementation and enforcement and the accountability of regulatory actors. One of the key observations, read across from national regulatory studies, was that the ‘regulatory state’ mode of governance through agencies, rules, monitoring and enforcement was much less costly than the more direct governance modes of the welfare state. Equally fundamental are observations about how difficult it is to steer behaviour through rules and for the EU this difficulty is compounded by being at one remove from citizens and firms, the ultimate targets of regulation. This is because responsibilities for law-making and implementation are substantially divided between the Union and the Member States respectively, making national governments and agencies key actors in regulatory processes within the EU.