Fictions and fuzziness: soft law rule-making among the EU's decentralized agencies

This chapter is part of an ongoing body of scholarship which explores the soft law rule-making practices, roles, and functions of the EU’s decentralized agencies. It does so in three sections. Section 1 situates EU agencies in the broader institutional landscape of the EU and offers up a sketch of the differentiated, self-authored guidance practices among those agencies, plus the relevant legislative grants of power. This is necessarily high-level but provides a backdrop for the deep dive, in section 2, to one particular EU agency, the European Chemicals Agency, and its guidance-making practices and powers. In section 3, I set out what I see as the set of fuzzy logics and fictions that are often deployed when it comes to thinking about the normative force, functions, and place of EU agency guidance.