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Abstract

This volume investigates whether and why the European Commission is becoming increasingly involved in the domestic implementation of EU policy programmes and how such new supranational involvement affects national administrative procedures. Resource dependence and principal/agent theory serve as a background for advancing an ‘implementation management explanation’. At the very centre stands the hypothesis that the European Commission is about to be transformed into a co-manager of domestic policy execution. The main empirical questions are: Why is there a growing demand for the control of domestic policy implementation at the supranational level? And, how does supranational procedural change transform the national implementation of EU structural policy?