Synthesis and Assessment

As set out in our introductory chapter, this work has been designed as an examination of the diverse forms and structures of administrative law applicable within various, specific areas of European Union policies. Its intention is to allow insight into the administrative implementation of Union policies in parallel with one another, reviewing and reflecting on both the differences and commonalities of approach in the varied policy sectors. The administrative differences between sectors may, in fact, lie simply in the policy-specific search for answers to problems already solved in another context, be the consequence of pure ‘path dependency’, or reflect a carefully designed approach which takes into account existing general legal principles, but does so in applying them to a discrete policy field. The starting assumption of this work was that some elements of Union administrative law are applicable cross-sectorally, but much is particular to individual policy settings. In fact, only relatively little existing EU law of a cross-sectoral kind can serve as an—even nascent—body of coherent, general Union administrative law. Most of the law applicable to the practical implementation of EU policy and its legal embodiment—broadly, the administrative law of the Union—has arisen in policy-specific settings. Perhaps the most widely