The founding of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in 2002 has been a hallmark in the Europeanization of food safety governance. A yet much neglected perspective is EFSA’s networking with national authorities. I argue that EFSA is a “networked agency” heavily relying on both the staff and the expertise of national organisations in order to deliver a genuinely “European expertise” for mainly European Union bodies. The need for networking is much embedded in EFSA’s institutional design itself and aims at both providing the best possible science for regulatory policy-making and at regulating the national production of regulatory science itself. Through the development of “guidance documents” EFSA aims at shaping national risk assessment practices in order to harmonise the available regulatory knowledge. Although EFSA was never (officially) intended to be a scientifically supreme European institution, empirics show EFSA becoming a point of reference challenging the national provision of expertise.
