This book first provides a critical analysis of the legal framework that governs the delegation of rulemaking powers to the European Commission. Second, it explores how the framework that governs such a delegation of powers to the Commission operates in the food and health policy domain.

Examining the constitutional and procedural arrangements that enable the European Commission to adopt general and legally binding rules, this book explores how the system works in practice, subsequent to the sweeping reforms recently implemented.

In the face of the current confusion about the use of arts 290 and 291 TFEU, there is need of further development of the theory of legislative delegation to the EU Commission. This timely book approaches this question from a practical perspective with a detailed examination of how the legislator uses delegated and implementing mandates in different fields of EU law. Offering an analysis of legislative practice and providing concrete evidence of how articles 290 and 291 TFEU are actually handled, it offers new insight into potential developments in EU administrative law.

This book revisits the Treaty of Lisbon's promise to further parliamentarize the EU's functioning by looking into the Treaty-law framework governing the delegation of legislative power in the EU. In this field, the Lisbon Treaty formally greatly strengthened the position of the European Parliament vis-à-vis both the European Commission and the Council. The book explores whether Parliament's formally reinforced role is reflected in the actual balance of powers in the area of delegated legislation and executive rule-making. It does so by assessing how both the law and practice of decision-making at the legislative level, looking at specific case studies, and the sub-legislative level, examining the scrutiny over delegated legislation, has crystallized in the ten years following the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty. This rigorous study gives a fascinating insight into one of the most significant developments in European parliamentary law-making, which EU constitutional lawyers will find required reading.

Every year the EU Commission issues thousands of rules based on powers delegated by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament. But delegation is carefully controlled. Traditionally, control has been exerted through a system of committees of member state representatives ('comitology'). However, this system was contested by the European Parliament which was left without any influence. The Lisbon Treaty introduced a new control regime for delegated powers, the so-called delegated acts system, which was meant to supplement the existing system. The new system involves direct control by the Council of Ministers and the European Parliament and thus for the first time gave the European Parliament real influence over delegated powers. However, the choice over which delegation regime to use in practice has turned into one of the most vehement institutional conflicts in the EU political system. This book represents the first comprehensive investigation of this conflict. It does so by a combination of methods and data, including process-tracing of the introduction of the new system in the Lisbon Treaty, case studies of selected post-Lisbon delegation situations, and statistical analysis of datasets comprising hundreds of post-Lisbon legislative files.

With each legislative issue, legislators have to decide whether to delegate decision-making to the executive and/or to expert bodies in order to flesh out the details of this legislation, or, alternatively, to spell out all aspects of this decision in legislation proper. The reasons why to delegate have been of prime interest to political science. The debate has concentrated on principal-agent theory to explain why politicians delegate decision-making to bureaucrats, to independent regulatory agencies, and to others actors and how to control these agents. By contrast, Changing Rules of Delegation focuses on these questions: Which actors are empowered by delegation? Are executive actors empowered over legislative actors? How do legislative actors react to the loss of power? What opportunities are there to change the institutional rules governing delegation in order to (re)gain institutional power and, with it influence over policy outcomes? The authors analyze the conditions and processes of change of the rules that delegate decision-making power to the Commission's implementing powers under comitology. Focusing on the role of the European Parliament the authors explain why the Commission, the Council, and increasingly the Parliament, delegated decision-making to the Commission. If they chose delegation, they still have to determine under which institutional rule comitology should operate. These rules, too, distribute power unequally among actors and therefore raise the question of how they came about in the first place and whether and how the "losers" of a rule change seek to alter the rules at a later point in time.

This book focuses on the evaluation of delegated and implementing rule-making, based on Articles 290 and 291 TFEU. These articles have attracted considerable attention since their introduction in 2009, and their implementation is one of the most hotly debated questions in European Administrative Law. The book takes up this timely topic, discusses it in an innovative way and offers valuable new insights. Delegated and implementing acts are the most common form of EU legal acts. However, despite their ubiquity and relevance, it is unclear how the Commission’s powers to adopt these important acts relates to subjects’ democratic rights. Accordingly, the book explores the question of how the Commission’s powers to adopt delegated and implementing acts can be justified. The relationship between the Commission and the persons within the Member States who are directly affected by its rule-making should be seen, the book argues, as one of institutional trust, and as a result as a fiduciary relationship. The book begins by defining the theoretical conditions for a justificatory approach, before explaining the background and foundations of fiduciary law. It then links this theoretical perspective with the realities of delegated and implementing acts, describing how the various roles in fiduciary relationships map onto the rule-making process that produces delegated and implementing acts, and explains how the fundamental tenet of fiduciary relationships – loyalty – can be included in the rule-making process.