Talkin’ bout a revolution? EU climate policy and institutional change in the Recovery and Resilience Facility

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the EU adopted a new and novel Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF). The RRF makes available an unprecedented amount of funding, to be raised on capital markets and repaid using new EU own-resources, distributed in both grants and loans, and governed using policy conditionality that potentially hardens otherwise soft provisions. Recent literature has documented the novelty of this framework but also evidence of path dependency in its creation noting, in particular, that the RRF is implemented via the European Semester, a pre-existing experimental governance framework for economic and fiscal governance. In this article, we progress this argument - that the RRF is not as new as it first appears - by studying the early stages of its implementation. Examining the utilisation of the Semester as the RRF’s governance framework and the importing of policy commitments and content from the field of climate policy, we argue that there has been a gradual institutional change, in which new rules are layered onto existing governance architectures, and that the apparent hardening of governance is less so when explored in practice.