The Compliance Promoting Toolkit of the European Commission: Enhancing or Undermining Accountability through New Techniques of Governance?

The infringement process contained in Article 258 TFEU is the traditional (public) centralised mechanism of enforcement of EU law. It requires the Commission, as guardian of the treaties, to monitor the performance of member states in relation to the implementation and application of EU norms. Centralised enforcement has become a layered and contested process. There is the formal familiar legal process set out in the treaties and, in its shadow, the informal administrative process where most of the enforcement work is actually carried out. The administrative process contains a set of ‘compliance promoting tools’ developed by the Commission which comprise a blend of traditional and new techniques of governance (horizontal cooperation of national authorities, networks comprised of elite actors and so on) which might be considered to undermine the traditional perception of centralised enforcement as a technique dedicated to achieving accountability and upholding the rule of law.  The compliance promoting toolkit operate without transparency and present a challenge to traditional perceptions of accountability in the name of achieving more effective enforcement. This paper considers whether it is possible for this to unpick this contradiction in the perception of centralised enforcement in order to achieve both greater accountability and more effectiveness through the use of blended enforcement techniques which embrace new modes of governance whilst achieving more transparency and accountability for those actors involved in the enforcement of EU law.