Joint implementation in the EU: Squaring the competence-control circle?

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Freudlsperger
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 532657320

The core interest of this project is to analyse why, how, and to which effect the EU relies on “joint implementation”, i.e., the physical involvement of supranational alongside national resources in the monitoring and enforcement of EU policies on the ground. In the EU, as in other multilevel institutional settings, effective implementation is particularly difficult and riddled with potential dysfunctionalities. The “polycrisis” of the past fifteen years has repeatedly highlighted the implementation deficits in the EU multilevel system. Reacting to these deficits, the EU has increasingly relied on the ‘joint implementation’ model that requires the creation of novel administrative, coercive, fiscal, and/or technical resources on the supranational level. From the perspective of the overall framework of the proposed Research Unit "on Reconfiguring Europe", joint implementation formulates a novel response to the general dilemma between competence and control in multilevel systems. It can be interpreted as an attempt to tread a middle ground between competence and control in the quest for a more effective system of multilevel implementation. In the Research Unit, the project adds to the interest in EU-level resources (Genschel, Hartlapp, Jachtenfuchs, Schimmelfennig) and contributes an analysis of their usage for policy implementation. The project examines whether joint implementation provides the EU with a means to reconcile competence and control, and thus establishes a novel “competence-control balance” or whether, in line with the two main conjectures of the Research Unit, the system suffers from too much member state control and too little EU competence.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5770: Reconfiguring Europe: Between competence and control
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Partner Organisation: Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (SNF)