ABSTRACT
The institutional framework limits policy entrepreneurship initiatives outside the Commission: a rare example is the Dutch European Union (EU) Presidency’s new EU Urban Agenda. However, despite its initial success, long-term survival of any EU policy initiative rests on achieving institutional and financial grounding that only the Commission can guarantee. A particular case of both agency and agentic power – and the advantages of being relatively privileged by the EU institutional framework – is the bureaucratisation and party-politicisation of the Committee of the Regions. Over time the Committee has evolved from being a mere instrument to involve substate authorities in EU affairs, into an actor with fully autonomous priorities and behaviour, including with regards to its own members – thus being an agent that is both an enabler and a framer of its theoretical principals. All actors and institutions operating in the EU Multilevel Governance context reveal similar patterns of behaviour.
