This book examines regulatory capacity beyond the nation state. It suggests that we can only
understand why EU agencies are able to build EU regulatory capacity if we acknowledge that
national regulators provide their expertise staff and resources to the regulatory processes
taking place in these EU bodies. This raises the puzzle of why national regulators are willing
to provide 'life support' to potentially rival organisations. The book is devoted to answering
this question in order to understand how EU regulatory capacity is created in the absence of a
full supranational regulatory bureaucracy. To do so the book studies to what extent national
regulators from two countries (the UK and Germany) support EU agencies in their work across
four policy sectors (drug safety food safety maritime safety and banking supervision). The
book makes a significant contribution by developing a bureaucratic politics perspective that
highlights the importance of national regulators for EU regulatory capacity building.
