What is the project about?
A closer look at regulatory dynamics post-pandemic
The COVID-19 emergency has led the EU to employ unconventional regulatory tools, diverging from its established law-making procedures and the traditional community method. The EU response to the pandemic significantly leveraged new modes of governance such as soft-law coordination and procurement, but it also used existing instruments in an innovative way, as in the case of NGEU’s cohesion policy. This departure from the norm has raised questions about the shifting landscape of EU governance and its implications for democratic legitimacy.
With the support of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme, the REXPO project investigates these critical shifts in post-pandemic regulatory practices. Through empirical case studies, REXPO examines the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on the EU institutional balance, disentangling the relationship between executive power and the regulatory instruments mobilised to face the crisis. The four case studies focus on: NGEU and cohesion policy; SURE and social policies; soft-law coordination in the field of health and public procurement for vaccines distribution. REXPO’s main research hypothesis is that, despite the move away from the Community Method, recourse to unconventional regulatory instruments, all centrally managed by the Commission, has considerably enhanced its executive tasks. REXPO defines such shifts in executive power as “residual”, because they emerged as secondary results of choices necessary to fight the pandemic.
1. How did the EU response to the pandemic change the nature of EU regulation and of EU regulatory practices?
2. How did the resulting regulatory environment affect the EU institutional balance and democratic legitimacy, in particular with regard to shifts in executive power?
To unpack the pandemic’s legal and political ramifications for EU governance, REXPO adopts an interdisciplinary approach and a law-in context methodology. It considers the changes to the legal environment as embedded within the historical and social context, combining doctrinal and legal analysis with integration theories and empirical methods. It develops case studies based on interviews with relevant decision-makers. Such an approach is especially appropriate to the study of the very recent post-pandemic developments, which are driven by the historical and political context, and allows to account for their short- and long-term impact.
About the Researcher
“Crises are well known for their transformative potential. The pandemic is no exception. It has profoundly changed the EU regulatory landscape, mobilising unconventional regulatory instruments and practices, i.e. funding, procurement or soft-law coordination. REXPO is about these new regulatory patterns and their consequences for the EU governance and democratic legitimacy.”
Maria Patrin is a Marie Curie Fellow at the Jacques Delors Centre of the Hertie School in Berlin, where she works on the REXPO project. Patrin was previously a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Florence and Research Associate at the EUI, where she also obtained a PhD. She holds degrees in political science and philosophy from the College of Europe and La Sapienza University in Rome. Prior to her academic career she worked several years in private practice in Brussels.
Her main research interest lies with EU institutional law, EU governance and European integration and is the author of “Collegiality in the European Commission. Legal Substance and Institutional Practice” (OUP 2024).
