The EU agencies’ role in policy diffusion beyond the EU: EEA, EMA and EFSA

The extensive literature on the EU agencies has mainly focused on their role in the harmonisation and expansion of regulatory standards within the EU. This paper joins this literature and investigates the role of EU agencies in policy diffusion beyond the EU borders. To operationalise this, the paper identifies and compares the organisation structural characteristics in three decentralised agencies, namely the European Environmental Agency (EEA), the European Medicine Agency (EMA), and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). These agencies share a common interest in the environment and health quality within the risk assessment. This paper shows that the EU agencies develop various entrepreneurial methods and that they actively promote policy diffusion beyond the EU through socialisation and learning within international arrangements and collaborations. However, variations in their organisation structural characteristics lead to differences in their international arrangements and policy diffusion.