The EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility: A Next Phase in EU Socioeconomic Governance?
Bekker, Sonja
(2021) Politics and Governance, volume 9, issue 3, pp. 175 - 185
(Article)
Abstract
The European Semester (Semester) was implemented a decade ago. Ample research has addressed the Semester’s development, including some major changes in processes and content (Verdun & Zeitlin, 2018). The Covid-19 crisis seems to mark the next stage in the evolution of the Semester. It connects the Semester with the wider
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Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) and links its country-specific recommendations to conditional financial support. Thus, the next stage of the Semester suggests a stronger and more deliberate interlinkage of different EU tools that jointly guide national socioeconomic policies. It should support both national public investment and reforms while focusing on meeting the EU priority of moving towards a climate-neutral, digitalized, and resilient Europe (De la Porte & Dagnis Jensen, 2021). This article addresses the question of what room the new-style Semester gives to the involvement of national-level actors, such as national parliaments. Therefore, it expands existing analytical frameworks in order to assess the RRF in connection to the Semester, focusing on the degree of obligation, enforcement, and centralisation. Jointly, this outlines the room the RRF gives to the participation of national actors in the Semester. The article concludes that although the national parliaments are not mentioned in the Regulation establishing the RRF, they could claim a role both in developing national plans for accessing financial support as well as in amending and approving reforms.
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Keywords: European Semester, European social policy, National parliament, Recovery and Resilience Facility, Sociology and Political Science, Public Administration
ISSN: 2183-2463
Publisher: Cogitatio Press
Note: Funding Information: states in 2004 and 2007, albeit in quite a specific form: accession conditionality instead of crisis condi‐ tionality (Jacoby & Hopkin, 2020). Since 2008, and directly related to the economic and financial crisis, conditionality has been used more widely to drive national reforms, especially in the case of the bail‐out programmes of countries that signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the ‘Troika’ of the European Central Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the European Commission (Theodoropoulou, 2015). This conditionality focused on core state functions in the fiscal, labour market, and social policy domains, and some of the demands had already been recommended within ‘soft’ law coordination prior to the crisis (Jacoby & Hopkin, 2020). However, bail‐out countries were taken out of the Semester coordination activities. Within the Semester, the move from the preventive to the correc‐ tive arms of both the SGP and the MIP may mean pro‐ gressing soft CSRs to stricter demands. Conditionality has also become a more prominent tool in the EU’s cohe‐ sion funds. Especially after 2014, the EU started adding the requirement to take relevant CSRs into account when designing national programmes, for instance allo‐ cating an appropriate amount of funding through the European Social Fund to meeting relevant CSRs (Jacoby & Hopkin, 2020; Viță, 2018). At present, conditional financial support from the RRF is tied, among others, to the CSRs, finding inspiration in the Memorandum of Understanding used in the former crisis. It came into the RRF following negotiations on the broader NGEU in the European Council as part of a package of con‐ cessions. The ‘Frugals,’ a group of small, rich coun‐ tries (the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Austria), were against debt mutualisation and higher EU budgets (De la Porte & Dagnis Jensen, 2021; Rijksoverheid, 2020). They accepted the RRF as an instrument in the NGEU in exchange for a high level of conditionality for the dis‐ bursement of grants and the acceptance by Poland and Hungary of the rule of law as a condition for receiving EU funds (De la Porte & Dagnis Jensen, 2021). Funding Information: Furthermore, the preamble of the Regulation addresses that there should be a match between the type of support (loan or grant) and the purpose of the financial assistance. There should also be a match with the costs of controls, the administrative burden, and the expected risk of non‐compliance. Accordingly, the non‐repayable financial support should take the form of a sui generis Union contribution and should be paid based on the achievement of results by reference to milestones and targets of the NRRPs. A decision to dis‐ burse the financial contribution may be made, however. Regarding the frequency of reporting and monitoring, Article 27 states that the member state shall report twice a year in the context of the Semester on the progress made, for which also the national reform programmes will be used. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 by the author; licensee Cogitatio (Lisbon, Portugal). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY).
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