Public Agencies in International Cooperation under National Legal Frameworks : Legitimacy and Accountability in Internationalised Nordic Public Law

The last few decades have witnessed a fundamental change in the administrative law structures of many states. Through the phenomena labelled globalisation, internationalisation and Europeanisation, the national public bodies have seen partially new legal frameworks for administrative activities, judicial review of decisions and accountability regimes. This is very clear in regard to administrative agencies of different kinds. Whereas a civil servant in an expert agency would perhaps fifty years ago still have been presumed to work almost entirely at the national level, with only occasional international contacts, today’s picture is entirely different. In many national administrative agencies, the everyday activities now involve working in international networks of different kinds. This development creates interesting tensions between the well-established constitutional structures and the internationalised role of public agencies. This article examines some aspects of these forms of international administrative cooperation in the perspective of the Nordic legal systems of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The main question for this article is how the international and European activities of national public agencies change the national agencies’ constitutional roles in their domestic systems for distribution of powers in relation to the core elements of legitimacy and accountability. This question gives rise to related sub-questions on the effects of international and European cooperation on the constitutional mechanisms of administrative steering, rule-making and transparency