Governance and the European Union

Sonia Lucarelli and James Sperling

Chapter 1 in Handbook of European Union Governance, 2025, pp 2-21 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The EU acts as an agent of external governance and a principal of transnational governance within the EU. The distinction between agent and principal is fuzzy and in many cases the EU functions as both concurrently, but it is also the case that the EU prerogatives in specific policy sectors rival or exceed those of the member states and in others it is clearly the subordinate actor with limited prerogatives and freedom of action. The ambiguous and shifting governance roles that the EU performs raise a series of questions: What are the material, technological, cognitive and normative origins of governance? What institutional and treaty-based factors account for the multilevel systems of EU governance? What are the characteristics of the societal, economic, security, milieu and global systems of governance? We first address those questions and then proceed to provide a summary assessment of governance within and by the EU.

Keywords: EU governance; Multilevel governance; Transnational governance; Liberal world order; Heterarchy; Hierarchy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781803925172
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