Información General

• Autores: María Luisa Sánchez Barrueco
• Editores: Swedish Institute for European Policy Studies
• Año de publicación: 2023
• Colecciones: Report, 3
• País: Suecia
• Idioma: inglés
• ISBN: 978-91-89498-10-5
• Enlaces
  • Texto Completo Libro

Resumen

• This research explains the main governance features of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) as a case of cross-pollination of the EU’s macroeconomic coordination policy into cohesion policy, which strengthens complexity and executive dominance under the pressure of emergency. It showcases the shortcomings of the accountability arrangements enshrined in the governing legal framework (Regulation 2020/241 of the Council and of the Parliament) and provides a comprehensive review of earlier practices and strategies put in place by accountability watchdogs to overcome these limitations. T he RRF is the channel that distributes 80% of NGEU funds to Member States, divided into two components: EUR385.8 billion in loans and EUR338 billion in grants, in 2022 prices. The RRF is embedded in cohesion policy but it departs from the usual practices in that area in several respects. Formally speaking, the RRF regulation places funds under ‘direct management’ by the Commission. However, funds are disbursed on a pay-per-plan, not on a pay-per-project, basis. T he Commission manages payments in very high figures and cannot decide the destination of the funds. Priorities and conditionalities are decided at the EU level (top-bottom), but the concrete reforms and investments are proposed by Member States in their national recovery and resilience plans (bottom-up). T he Commission plays a middleperson’s role, technically assessing milestones and thresholds proposed or achieved by national authorities, and preparing key implementing decisions to be adopted by the Council. The RRF strengthens executive power in the EU through its threefold supranational (Commission), pooled (Council and European Council) and national (central governments) dimensions, to the detriment of democratic accountability institutions and substate actors. National governments used the European Council to shape key details of the RRF, leaving little margin to the legislative powers of the Commission and the European Parliament. In splitting managing and monitoring roles, the RRF regulation suggests that all decisions taken at one level are monitored by the other(s). Yet, the numerous and broad criteria informing the decision and the lack of measurement indicators that may be consistently applied across levels increase the risk that the checks enshrined in the legal framework become in practice a semi-automatic endorsement (in the case of the Commission) or prioritise political reasons over substance (in the case of the Council). The governance framework transpires a mainly managerial nature, unfitting for the significance of the Resilience and Recovery Facility as the biggest spending programme of the EU in the 2021–2027 programming period, as a once-in-a-generation opportunity for modernisation of EU Member States, and as a source of debt that Europeans will have to repay until 2058.

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