Institutional design at the service of intergovernmental political control? The governance of the Recovery and Resilience Facility

Is institutional design always at the service of ‘efficient’ Member States control, as rational choice institutionalism (intergovernmentalism) would suggest? This paper analyses the governance of the Recovery and Resilience Facility and the multi-level system of intergovernmental control that lies at its core. It examines the inter-institutional distribution of power along the three stages of the implementation process –approval of national plans, compliance with targets and milestones and authorization of disbursement- and sheds light on the effectiveness of the triple intergovernmental net –Council, Ecofin Committee and Comitology- deployed to supervise it. We argue that while this atypical multipronged system of guarantee was originally negotiated with the goal of limiting the discretion of both the material (receptor Member States) and the institutional (Commission) beneficiaries of the RFF provisions, in practice the ‘efficient control’ hypothesis is weakened by evidence that the RFF governance escapes the logic of the narrow application of intergovernmental control. First, as suggested by the New Intergovernmentalism hypothesis, the exercise of conditionality based on the strict preferences of potential veto players (donor Member States) is softened by the presence of various consensus-seeking mechanisms. Second, building on historical institutionalism, we claim that the role played by the European Commission goes beyond that of a passive facilitator of inter-state consensus. The institutional position of the supranational actor is in fact enhanced by its growing role as a buffer against the expression of consensus-breaking preferences (of both donors and receptors Member States).