Bricolage or Entrepreneurship ?
Introduction
Cross-border health crises have attracted a lot of attention among the general public in the last few years , most recently with the Ebola virus . The European Union ( EU ) has a long history of health crises ( such as the Bovine spongiform encephalopathy or “ mad cow ” disease ). Most pertinently perhaps , the creation of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control ( ECDC ) is often portrayed as the functional response to the severe acute respiratory syndrome ( SARS ) crisis that occurred between November 2002 and July 2003 ( Greer 2012 ; Greer and Löblová 2016 ; McKee , Atun , and Coker 2008 ). This perspective on the importance of the crisis in the creation of the agency is often used to explain why such a short period was spent between the European Commission drafting a proposal to create the ECDC in July 2003 and the creation in situ of the agency in May 2005 . The ECDC hence looks like a mundane case of agency creation : a crisis triggered a response ; this response was a new agency . This idea that the time “ has come ” for an agency to be created is a recurring theme in the official narratives of agency creation as well as in the literature on the emergence of agencies that regulate or distribute information used by regulators ( Alam 2007 ; Maggetti 2013 ). The ECDC , in particular , is charged with bringing expertise to the table , thus reducing uncertainty and allowing an evidencebased regulation of risk .
The crisis-followed-by-agencycreation causal mechanism seems plausible . However , a minimum standard for causality is that the effect comes after the cause . But in the field of disease prevention and control in Europe , we can observe that some features of the ECDC were pre-existent to SARS ; notably a network of epidemiological surveillance , now an integral part of the ECDC , existed since the early 1990s . Moreover , the creation of a European agency dedicated to disease control has been disputed among experts and has been a topic of disagreement between European institutions since the late 1990s . At a minimum , the creation of an agency as response to the crisis has to be put in its context of conflict and contestation of the various institutional choices aired at the time . In this paper , I challenge the conventional wisdom of agency creation as response to the crisis and open the black box of the organizational and political processes of creation dynamics . As shown by Moe ( 2005 ), institutional emergence is a political process where power is created , distributed , and re-arranged in the form of a precise set of organizational features .
To answer questions about the causes of institutional creation , it is necessary to go beyond the crisis as a single explanatory variable and open our grandangle on the politics of agenda-setting and policy formulation . The multiple streams approach ( MSA ) seems a suitable , sophisticated theoretical lens to analyze how the agenda for the creation of the ECDC was set and how the policy idea of an agency emerged . In European Studies , the MSA has been fruitfully applied to the study of agenda-setting in the EU ( Ackrill , Kay , and Zahariadis 2013 ; Herweg 2015 ; Zahariadis 2008 )— adapting a model explaining agenda-setting in the United States ( Kingdon [ 1984 ] 2003 ). But
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