European agencies as agents of governance and EU learning

This article asks how the EU as a regional organization manages to learn and adapt to policy challenges. It investigates the evolution of one regional level and one national environmental agency (the European Environment Agency and the Environment Agency of England and Wales) which have distinct roles in influencing EU environmental policy performance. The article examines the role of agencies and bureaucracies more generally, investigating some of the assumptions made in the bureaucracy literature, particularly concerning principal–agent models. The focus on agencies helps to illuminate two potential dimensions of the EU process: overcoming the original institutional design and the role of organizational and policy learning.