Shaping governance in crisis: a case of joint purchasing in the EU

Over the past five years, the European Union has faced three major crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, the energy and security crises, both triggered by the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. To tackle them, the EU adopted a common response strategy by establishing at supranational level some joint purchasing mechanisms to address shortages of vaccines, gas, and military capabilities. However, the EU’s competence to act in the health, energy and defence sectors is limited, as these areas remain mainly under Member States’ responsibility. Although conceived with the same objective of procuring critical goods the joint purchasing mechanism’s governance differed substantially. During the pandemic the European Commission was delegated the authority to procure vaccines on Member States’ behalf, nevertheless this neither occurred in the energy nor in the defence cases. This paper analyses, through the lens of indirect governance, why the governance of these procurement mechanisms differs. The paper relies on an in-depth process-tracing based on the data collected through an extensive document analysis and subsequently triangulated with élite interviews. It aims to unveil the development of the negotiations over the establishment of the joint purchasing mechanisms in three policy areas, while considering the evolution inter-institutional dynamics in a context of crisis.