"As the European Commission, under its President, Jean-Claude Juncker, passes the mid-term of its mandate, this publication seeks to provide an updated overview of the work already schieved in each of the Commission's 10 priority areas since it took office. Published ahead of President Juncker's 2017 State of the Union speech, the analysis is intended to respond to the growing interest in assessing progress towards the targets that the Commission has set itself, and to identify areas in which difficulties have been, or are being, encountered."--Page 4 of cover.

How can we approach the Commission's role as co-manager of policy implementation? Why should we expect the Commission to be pulled into domestic policy execution and to accumulate something like an implementation management capacity? How should we conceptualise the Commission's linkage with post-decision management issues? Finally, how does the Commission's involvement in the application of EU policies, if any, significantly change everything? Such questions are answered in this study, which is concerned with what may be called the implementation management capacity of the European Commission. Simply put, this is the role the Commission plays in the implementation of large-scale European spending programmes. While it is true that the Commission's predominant prerogatives are to draft legislation and facilitate bargaining, it also has a role in post-decision policy management. This role is of increasing importance for the emerging governance of the European Union. Readership: social scientists, journalists and all those interested in the role of the European Commission in shaping EU policies.

The European Commission is at the center of the European Union's political system. Within its five-year terms each Commission proposes up to 2000 binding legal acts and therefore crucially shapes EU policy, which in turn impacts on the daily lives of more than 500 million European citizens. However, despite the Commissions key role in setting the agenda for European decision making, little is known about its internal dynamics when preparing legislation. This book provides a problem-driven, theoretically-founded, and empirically rich treatment of the so far still understudied process of position-formation inside the European Commission. It reveals that various internal political positions prevail and that the role of power and conflict inside the European Commission is essential to understanding its policy proposals. Opening the 'black box' of the Commission, the book identifies three ideal types of internal position-formation. The Commission is motivated by technocratic problem-solving, by competence-seeking utility maximization or ideologically-motivated policyseeking. Specifying conditions that favor one logic over the others, the typology furthers understanding of how the EU system functions and provides novel explanations of EU policies with substantial societal implications.