Towards a post-pandemic fiscal union? Differentiated member state governance of EU money: the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (EUMONEY)

• Applicant: Dr. Tiziano Zgaga
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 553596763

“Towards a post-pandemic fiscal union? Differentiated member state governance of EU money: the National Recovery and Resilience Plans (EUMONEY)” analyses the differentiated governance of European Union (EU) money, i.e. the institutions, actors, structures, and processes at the national level who decide on what EU money is spent, who perform the daily management of EU money, and who control this money against misuse. As European taxpayers’ money, EU money is politically salient: the EU is not a state, it is not allowed to unconditionally transfer money to the member states, and some countries strongly oppose the development of a European transfer union. EUMONEY considers the largest transfer of European money in the history of the EU, namely the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) as part of the COVID-19 recovery fund. It sheds light on the member state differentiated governance of the RRF money and has three aims: 1) to describe the constitutive elements of the differentiated governance of the RRF money to create governance typologies; 2) to understand to what extent member states developed a similar governance (institutional isomorphism) of the RRF money; 3) to explain why member states set up a differentiated governance of the RRF money. For the member states, EU money is attractive because it helps them financing domestic investments and reforms. Hence, they want to retain full control over the management of EU money. Yet, the EU institutions and the other member states want to control how EU money is managed and spent because it is money which belongs to all of them. EUMONEY examines this political tension by shedding light on the interplay between pressure from the EU (Europeanisation) and domestic preferences (domestication) in the establishment of the RRF money governance. The three aims of the project allow to assess if the post-pandemic EU has moved towards the creation of a fiscal union, i.e. a system where the central level (in this case, the EU) can collect a significant amount of truly own revenues and directly spend these resources on public goods, or transfer them to the constituent units (here, the member states) which have similar institutional arrangements to manage the money coming from the EU. EUMONEY considers four cases: two high beneficiaries of RRF money (Greece and Italy) and two low beneficiaries of RRF money (Germany and Netherlands). To describe and compare the typologies of RRF money governance, the project adopts qualitative content analysis. To reconstruct the mechanism explaining the establishment of the RRF money governance, it relies on causal process tracing. It analyses primary political and legal sources complemented with semi-structured interviews. EUMONEY publishes three single-authored peer-reviewed articles and submits a book proposal. It presents results at four international conferences, and it organizes a concluding workshop with national, European and American researchers and practitioners.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants