The Multiple Roads of Crisis Management: Implementing EU Crisis Management in a Multi-Level Governance System

Crisis management expresses at best the complexity of multi-level governance in the EU: on the one hand, responsibility towards crisis remains mostly a national matter; on the other, the EU has been developing over the last decade numerous crisis management frameworks, tools and policies to tackle transboundary crises, amounting to ‘core state powers’. Crises in Europe are often transboundary in that their causes and effects span over countries and sectors; the interdependence between countries has increased as a result of previous integration; the building of a single market has potentially disruptive consequences that call for cooperative common solutions. Multi-level crisis management in the EU thus faces raises question of legitimacy (who makes crisis decision) and efficiency (how to ensure implementation in a multi-level, complex system, with varying resources and interests). Implementation is a core challenge to the EU as it relies on member states resources (administrative, financial, expertise), while crises call for common and rapid responses. The article will compare four cases of implementation of multi-level EU crisis management, namely: invasive alien species, banking, youth unemployment, electricity transmission networks. In each case, interviews (n=130) were conducted at EU level and in various member states (France, UK, Germany, Spain). These cases represent varying EU strategies, with different degree of supranational competence or subsidiarity, involving member states to various degrees (from full Europeanisation to harmonisation of laws or coordination of policies), and with different degrees of prescriptiveness (from EU regulation to recommendation).