The EU has increased its financial powers with the Recovery and Resilience Facility and Next Generation EU. These new funds, with other EU off-budget funds and the regular budget, make up the EU's financial resources. Understanding if and how these resources are used is relevant as (re)distribution has increased and is here to stay.
With this aim, this project focuses on the process that lies between negotiating resources in Brussels and their decentralized implementation in member states. How does the EU spend its money?
ReSpend examines how the European Union allocates and disburses financial resources, particularly in the areas of social and industrial policy. The project applies competence-control (cc) theory to understand how institutional arrangements - the balance between the ability of DGs to act in line with their interests (competence) and bilateral or collective oversight by other actors (control) - affect EU spending practices and outcomes.
The three aims of the project are to capture and assess how EU money is spent, explain spending processes and outcomes with competence-control (cc) arrangements, and theorize the effects of spending on the EU political system. Empirically, the project offers an analysis of social and industrial policies over four decades (1987-2027). Methodologically, it builds the first database on spending at the program level with indicators on the gap between allocation and disbursement (volume and targets) and institutional features of spending governance. It combines a quantitative analysis of spending patterns with an in-depth analysis of 16 cases, systematically selected to vary between social and industrial policy, over time, and in institutional features of spending governance. The results are expected to provide a comparative empirical and theoretical account of EU spending as a distinct phase between intergovernmental budget negotiations and decentralized implementation that highlights the role of control and its effect on the reconfiguration of the EU system when moving beyond the regulatory state (Majone 1993) toward an expenditure state (Genschel and Jachtenfuchs 2014).