Europe's New Technocracy: Boundaries of Public Participation in EU Institutions.

Recently, an evolving literature on the EU as a "responsive technocracy" has analysed how the growing politicization of EU-level initiatives and institutions had led to those institutions responding by, for example, adopting new legislation (Rauh, 2016, 2019). Keywords: Technocracy; EU; Agencies; Stakeholder Engagement; Participation EN Technocracy EU Agencies Stakeholder Engagement Participation 459 473 15 04/24/21 20210301 NES 210301 Introduction Regional organizations in the Global North have sought to create avenues for legitimating integrationist activities. As such, the key to democratizing EU governance may be less a matter of creating "new" institutional arrangements, than of developing the logic through which public managers at the EU level can justify and extend stakeholder engagement practices. To show this, the article analyses semi-structured interviews with 24 European Union Commission Directorates-General (DGs), civil society organizations and independent agencies, as well as stakeholder engagement strategies and engagement requirements provided in governing regulations. [Extracted from the article]