The EU Hotspot Approach in Italy: A Case of Cultivated Spillover through Interagency Relations?

While the ‘hotspot approach’ introduced by the EU Commission in 2015 and implemented in Greece and Italy is widely discussed in the scholarly literature, we still lack a comprehensive and theoretically informed understanding of it. Addressing this research gap, this paper analyses the emergence and the operation of the ‘hotspots approach’ in Italy. Drawing on the experimental governance framework (Sabel and Zeitlin 2010), we argue that the ‘hotspot approach’ reflects the uncertainty and ambiguity of EU policy-makers of how to respond to the EU migration crisis in an effective and lawful way. In addition, the hotspot approach also allows the EU to signal problem-solving capacity to the general public without requiring the EU to resolve the interests diversity among EU governments about a further supranationalisation of the field. Notwithstanding these preferences, we show that the hotspot approach has created unintended supranational dynamics through the involvement of several EU agencies such as Frontex and EASO. Given the ambiguous and underspecified regulatory environment, EU agencies have increasingly shaped the EU´s hotspot approach through various forms of interagency cooperation. As a result, the growing role of EU agencies has not only nurtured distrust between member states and the EU but has also affected the fundamental rights of refugees.