EU health governance I: institutional approaches

Abstract

This panel brings together a set of institutional analyses of EU health governance. The papers of an assessment of how the EU’s policy-making and regulatory structures shape its health policy by structuring the narratives and actors involved. In the first paper, Thibaud Deruelle and Philipp Trein explore the EU’s choice of policy instruments in the health field, comparing those adopted to address immediate health crises to those which tackle longer term, latent threats. They argue that choice of instrument is driven by epistemic learning, following either a crisis or the diffusion of new policy goals. In the second paper, Eleanor Brooks presents a new framework for analysing the role of corporate actors in the EU’s policy process, drawing on existing frameworks from regulatory governance at national and global level. She argues that the Better Regulation agenda has fundamentally altered the context in which corporate actors engage with EU health regulation. In the third paper, Charlotte Godziewski maps out the fiscal and economic tools that the EU has utilised in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the emerging narrative around the ‘inclusive and green recovery’. Her paper explores the capacity for the EU’s economic and social governance frameworks to contribute to public health objectives, in light of their current, ambiguous, construction. Finally, Torben Fischer and Florian Tille examine the European Commission’s strategy of ‘unionisation’. They draw on the EU executive’s approach to the Banking Union and the Energy Union to analyse the potential trajectory of the recently-announced European Health Union, identifying a ‘hardening soft governance’ dynamic across these fields.

Title	Details
Policy Learning and EU Public Health Policy	View Paper Details
An Inclusive and Green Recovery: Mapping the EU economic and fiscal regulation response to the pandemic	View Paper Details
Health policy, lobbying and better regulation in the European Union	View Paper Details