Teaching - Geschwister-Scholl-Institute of Political Science at the LMU Munich, Germany

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What Happened with EU Money? Member States in the Final Year of the COVID-19 Recovery and Resilience Facility

MA seminar, October 2025 - February 2026

 

The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), adopted in 2021 to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, has been the largest transfer policy in the history of the European Union (EU)—€723.8 billion of common ‘EU money’ raised on financial markets and distributed to the member states as loans and grants. The RRF ends in August 2026. 

This seminar examines how successful member states have been in managing the RRF money, and what domestic governance they have set up to do so. Was the governance only a national decision or was there also some influence by the EU? As part of a Europeanization of national fiscal administrations, did a similar governance to manage EU money emerge in different countries? This would have important implications for the development of a European fiscal union.

 

Literature: 

Ladi, S., Tsarouhas, D. & Copeland, P. (2025). Negotiating the recovery and resilience facility: the emergence of coordinative conditionality. Comparative European Politics, 23, 18–39.

Zeitlin, J., Bokhorst, D., & Eihmanis, E. (2025). Governing the European Union's recovery and resilience facility: National ownership and performance-based financing in theory and practice. Regulation & Governance.

Knill, C. (2001). The Europeanization of National Administrations. Patterns of Institutional Change and Persistence. Cambridge University Press.

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