The External Dimension of EU Bodies and Agencies: Law and Policy

In recent years, the international engagement of the EU’s decentralized agencies has continued to increase in the absence of a clear political and legal framework for their activities.

This timely book addresses urgent questions about these agencies’ external actions and their effects, how these should be conceptualized and assessed, and how they can and should be governed in the future.

Bringing together pioneering interdisciplinary work from European legal and political scholars, this book combines theory with empirical case studies to explore an underdeveloped field and identify a future research agenda. Chapters first comprehensively examine the relevant legal frameworks and the political aspects of these decentralized agencies’ external activities, before exploring the questions this raises around their own and the EU’s legitimacy and accountability, and the impact of agencies on countries outside the EU who have dealings with them.

Scholars in law, political science, economics and public administration will find this book invaluable, particularly those working on external relations, agencification or institutional innovation. It will also prove useful to policymakers at EU and national level, as well as other stakeholders such as non-EU countries and international organizations.