This article aims at identifying European agencies' rulemaking powers, mapping the procedures through which such powers are exercised and assessing the existing procedural arrangements. The first section analyses the main forms of European agencies' rulemaking. It shows, on the one hand, that not all European agencies are actually engaged in the adoption of administrative rules, on the other hand, that European agencies carrying out rulemaking activities tend to converge on two specific forms of rulemaking, namely participation in the adoption of binding implementing rules and regulation by soft law. The second section, devoted to mapping the procedures through which rulemaking powers are exercised, argues that the two main types of European agencies' rulemaking cannot be said to be subject to a really common procedural framework. In both cases, the emerging procedural rules implement the same principles of transparency and participation and rely on the same consultation mechanism, sometimes complemented by regulatory impact assessment. Yet, proceduralisation has an uneven development: while the establishment of a procedural discipline is quite common with reference to participation in the adoption of binding implementing rules, regulation by soft law remains largely under‐proceduralised. The last section proposes an assessment of the European agencies' rulemaking procedures. Two main shortcomings are identified: the asymmetry between the tendency to proceduralise the adoption of binding implementing rules and the parallel tendency to keep informal the process of adoption of soft law measures; and the too rudimental development of consultation.

This paper focuses on the adoption of a number of Community regulations, each for a specific sector, to be implemented not just by a supranational administration (central or peripheral), but by a plurality of national, supranational and sometimes mixed authorities, with a special role assigned to a Community office set up by the same legislation for a given sector, and granting it legal personality. The purpose of this paper is to verify whether the various regulations by sector ought not to be regarded as variants of an emergent general model of joint exercise of certain Community functions. It is argued that such general model is still in the making, but it is in the process of becoming consolidated, notwithstanding the variety of approaches adopted by European legislators. Such a pattern is characterised by specific, differentiated organisational and procedural features. This conclusion is relevant in several different ways, the first of which is that it provides new conceptual tools for interpreting and explaining the process of administrative integration between supranational and national public authorities, in particular by specifying the taxonomy of the patterns through which a Community function can be carried out by two different authorities acting jointly. Second, the decentralised integration model should be considered as a sound and feasible option for the administrative evolution of the Community legal system.

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