From internal experts to external interlocutors? EU agencies and procedures assessing the equivalence of third country legal rules with EU regulatory standards

this paper will offer an overview of procedures allowing EU agencies to determine the equivalence of third country regulatory regimes
and conceptualise the accountability challenges they pose. Proceeding in three parts, the first part will identify and classify the different third country equivalence procedures in place. Analysing the legal basis for agency intervention and the specific powers granted to the respective agencies in that respect, this part will allow to develop a topology of two different equivalence roles conferred on EU agencies. Building upon this descriptive analysis, the second part will identify two accountability challenges associated with each of the identified third country equivalence procedure categories. Seeking to overcome those challenges, the third part of the paper will make four pointed suggestions aimed at recognising explicitly and in a more centralised way the external action powers conferred on EU agencies. Doing so would at the very least allow better to tailor modifications to the external action frameworks against the background of which existing equivalence procedures currently already implicitly operate.