The Regulatory Institute makes this initially internal document accessible to those working on new EU legislation because it is a unique instrument that can be used to improve EU legislation by drawing on tools that have already been tested in other regulatory sectors. The Toolbox avoids reinventing the wheel. Above all, it enables EU legislation to be made more complete, and therefore more efficient and less open to diverging interpretations. Using these tools can promote a more uniform, consistent and stringent application of the law. In turn, this can help create or preserve a level playing field, and thus trust.

Download the second edition of the EU-Legislators’ Toolbox

If you cannot find the appropriate tools in this Toolbox, we recommend our Cross-sectoral Standard Provisions and its complementary lists. The chapter titles in that document are similar to those in the Toolbox, enabling you to navigate easily between the corresponding chapters. More recommendations can be found at the end of this document under “Further Tools”.

The current version of this Toolbox is the second edition. The second edition is the fruit of the parallel Commonwealth and Latin American Legislators’ Toolbox. Each time we drafted an entry to the Commonwealth and Latin American Legislators’ Toolbox, we looked for references in EU legislation. When successful, we could enlarge this Toolbox by a new entry. As a result, the number of entries has grown to 388.

There are also some entries in the parallel Commonwealth and Latin American Legislators’ Toolbox that have no equivalent in this Toolbox. Inter alia, we found an interesting opt-in mechanism for sub-states in Australia and Argentina: the federal state adopts a law, and the sub-states decide on whether to apply it. This mechanism could promote harmonisation in sectors where the classic EU harmonisation approaches fail, e.g. pending consensus or qualified majority, or even where the legislative competence of the EU is questionable. Hence, we recommend the use of the parallel Commonwealth and Latin American Legislators’ Toolbox to complement the readers overview on legislative tools.

For those readers who are particularly interested in the current fashionable topic “simplification”, we have singled out simplification tools. If you would like further topic-related subsets of this Toolbox or a sector-specific selection, please contact us.

For questions or suggestions, please contact: manager@regulatoryinstitute.org