The participation of private parties, such as the social partners or the standardisation bodies, as (co-)decision-makers in the administrative decision-making process is a prevalent phenomenon. Private rule-making has become an important regulatory mechanism in EU administrative governance in sectors such as financial markets, food regulation, consumer protection, product safety, data protection, environmental policy. The Commission’s new Better Regulation package issued in May 19, 2015 encourages the use of ‘both regulatory and well-designed non- regulatory means’. While the involvement of private parties in EU administrative governance has the clear advantage of delivering policies which are based on the expertise of the regulatees, private-party rule-making raises significant concerns in terms of its legitimacy.

The proposed workshop aims at examining the system of co-regulation via European standardisation from the perspectives of different sectors of the EU law.  In this manner, this workshop will also address the wide range of concerns raised by the phenomenon of private-party rule making of which European standardisation is a representative example. 

The workshop aims at filling the gap in research in the area of EU standardisation by convening scholars from different backgrounds with the aim of discussing the overarching research question of the legitimacy of using EU standardisation for regulatory purposes.