Delegated Rulemaking in the European Union Fifteen Years Post-Lisbon: Taking Stock and Forward-Looking Reflections

Abstract Drawing on the findings from the contributions to this Special Issue, this article maintains that, fifteen years after Lisbon, a debate on the law and politics of delegated rulemaking in the European Union (EU) is as relevant as ever. That is because the functional and procedural integration of the Member States in the EU multilevel and multi-jurisdictional legal system, supplanted by unprecedented challenges for supranational crisis management in the recent years, often led to unpredictable and often controversial configurations of delegated rulemaking. One may thus conclude that, fifteen years later, the constitutional framework put in place in the Lisbon Treaty has not been able to effectively constrain the normative development that evolved from delegated rulemaking, which often followed a different path. Hence the Lisbon Treaty provides only a partial blueprint for delegated rulemaking, leaving out rulemaking by EU agencies, regulatory frameworks and private parties, as well as increasingly composite and hybrid cooperation formulas involving EU and national executive actors. The future of EU delegated rulemaking will very much depend on the capacity to reach consensus on important meta-principles and political conceptions, such as democratisation and parliamentarisation, shaping the normative spaces generated within the sui generis dynamic European model of governance.