Delegation and responsibility: assessing decentralized modes of governance at the Communitarian level

Delegation of powers and functions to semi-detached bodies inside European Union represents an interesting and partially new case of organizational governance change. The EU’s institutional setting influences the evolution of this process and its characteristics. At the light of the debate into the public management literature on delegation, this phenomenon is evaluated, in order to define a “model” of European agency and to discuss the features characterizing the relationships between the principals (first, the European Commission) and the agents (EU’s agencies) and in more general terms, the networked relationships between EU’s agencies and their stakeholders. A brief presentation of the overall system of delegation inside EU is integrated by a discussion of the findings resulting from an analysis of two specific case studies: the ones of EMA (European Medicines Agency) and EEA (European Environment Agency).