The EU has a complex system of institutional mechanisms for enforcing compliance with its laws and policies. In different policy areas these institutional arrangements differ along several important dimensions, including the roles of the European Commission, the European Court of Justice, and the member states in the process. In the sphere of economic governance new enforcement mechanisms have been recently created. In the traditional domains falling under the remit of the infringement procedures, voluntary dispute-settling mechanisms have taken a big part of the burden of enforcement. All these developments, however, seem to happen without a clear template or vision about the institutional form enforcement in the EU should take. This paper offers a theoretical assessment of the various institutional mechanisms that the EU has for law and policy enforcement. Informed by the latest data on the functioning of the various mechanisms, the paper discusses the strategic challenges of enforcement and compliance in a multi-level system of governance.
