European Administrative Space - EAS Swedish Agency for Public Administration

EAS = the 16 administrations responsible for implementing the policies of the union Trends of development Trends concerning the institutions of the union Trends concerning the administrations of the member states Areas for initiatives

The IGC will strengthen the legal grounds for an explicit administrative policy Certain fundamental principles of “good administration” will become binding for the institutions of the union (§ I-48/49 + § II-41) European laws shall establish specific provisions in order to ensure an open, efficient and independent administration (§ III-304) Effective implementation of Union law by the Member States will for the first time be regarded as a matter of common interest (§ III-185)

The EC-court has during a long time created a legal praxis for the EU-institutions All decisions should be motivated correctly All directly involved parties has the right to be heard in administrative cases All relevant facts must be collected in all administrative cases Only a narrow strata of civil servants are exempted from the principle of free movement (§ 39.4)

The attempts to initiate an administrative law for the institutions of the union seems to have lost momentum The Ombudsman created a Code of Good Administrative Behaviour in 1999 The right to good administration was included in the Charter of Fundamental Rights The European Parliament adopted a resolution confirming the Code and asked the commission to propose a regulation based on the Code

The commission attempts to modernise its organisation and externalise non-core tasks Externalise non-core tasks to Regulatory agencies Networks of national administrations Target-based tripartite contracts Modernise their organisational culture and personnel policies Improve routines of consultation and dialogue Formalise the usage of expertise

Secondary law creates a growing but unclear pressure for change on the member states administrations Most secondary laws impose some kind of conditions for implementation Some imply simple organisational change, some imply more complex changes that can ultimately can challenge fundamental principles of the administrative doctrine of a member state The borderline between sector-based and administrative politics becomes blurred

The financial assistance for institutional building measures will be phased out as the new member states become full members The commission runs the Phare programme that supports institution-building in the new member states Some countries still have some way to go in terms of administrative capacity for implementing the EC-law

The development of e-government creates a pressure of change directed towards the member states administrations The commission pursues several programmes devoted to developing methods for e-government The focus now seems to have shifted towards legal and organisational changes necessary to support the development of e-government

EPAN has plays a relatively minor role in the development of EAS Issues of personnel policies Benchmarking Common Assessment Framework E-government No focus on the general development of the European Administrative Space

The European Ministers responsible for administrative politics has only a marginal impact on the direction of the development The informal meetings of the ministers responsible for administrative politics play only a marginal role The development is instead the result of disparate legal and political initiatives driven by different actors, formerly the European Court, Ombudsman and Parliament

Areas for initiatives If the new constitution provides new legal foundations for “good governance, what should “good governance” of the European Union mean concretely and how can the administration of the European Union be brought up to par with the best in the world? As the financial assistance for institutional building measures in the candidate countries gradually fades out how can concrete measures of knowledge-transfer within the field of administrative politics be institutionalised between ‘old’ and ‘new’ member states? Can a mechanism be set up to keep track of the borderline between sector-based politics and administrative politics?