This review paper, with a clear political science and public administration bias, takes stock of the existing literature on EU agencies and suggests a future research agenda in this area. We review studies on EU agencies’ organization, tasks, proliferation and location in the political-administrative space. Whether the advent of EU agencies tends to underpin a basically intergovernmental, transnational or supranational order is a major topic with potentially huge consequences for the distribution of power across levels of government, for the degree of policy uniformity and pooling of administrative resources across countries, for the role of genuinely European perspectives in the policy process, and for accountability relations. Although the jury is still partly out on most topics, we see the contours of a more direct multilevel administration, meaning that EU agencies not only constitute nodes within transnational agency networks, but in addition, in governance terms, relate more closely to the European Commission than to any other institution or actor.
This paper was first published as TARN Working Paper 1/2016.