EU Economic Governance Between Executive Dominance and Expert Delegation: Assessing the Implementation of NGEU in Southern Europe

The implementation of the European Union’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RFF) involves the disbursement of unprecedented amounts of public funding through a novel, performance-based mechanism. Both the extent of public finance involved and the approach applied to this spending programme raise important questions about democratic legitimacy and the degree of parliamentary oversight, not least because of the wider implications that the process has for EU economic governance more generally. This paper examines these questions about legitimacy and democratic control through a comparative case study of the implementation of the RRF in the two member states that have been allocated the largest share of the facility, namely Italy and Spain. Both are member states with a history of high levels of public spending and debt, yet also differ in the nature of their constitutional arrangements and degree of political stability. The paper analyses the democratic credentials of the manner in which the RRF has been implemented in Italy and Spain by examining four key aspects of the implemation process: the political and administrative arrangements within the national executive, the involvement of national parliaments, the consultation of technical experts and advisors, and the role of regional and local authorities. Based on the empirical analysis of the experience in both countries, the paper concludes that the RFF implementation process is largely governed by technocratic and managerial considerations, is heavily dominated by national and European executives, and is subject to only very limited parliamentary scrutiny - findings which correlate with the wider transformation in EU economic governance where a trajectory of deepening executive dominance has been observed dating for some time, back to the management of Eurozone crisis.