From Crisis to Capacity: Subnational Crisis Governance and Resilience Building in EU Disaster Management

Resilience to increasingly transboundary natural disasters has become a central priority for the European Union (EU). Recent initiatives – such as the European Climate Risk Assessment and proposals for an integrated framework for climate resilience and risk management – underscore the urgency of strengthening coordinated responses across all levels in executive governance. These efforts highlight a growing recognition that, in contexts of multiple crises, subnational administrations are critical actors in inter-institutional relations, and that Europe’s ability to confront natural hazards ultimately depends on the capacity and coordination of regional executives within the multi-level system. Despite this heightened policy attention, political science research on EU crisis governance continues to concentrate predominantly on supranational institutions and national governments (e.g. Dinan et al. 2017; Riddervold et al. 2021; Cabane and Lodge 2024), leaving the crisis management and resilience-building activities of regional authorities rather underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by examining convergence and divergence in subnational crisis governance across the European multi-level system. It asks two core questions: (1) Which factors determine the crisis governance and resilience of subnational units in the EU? (2) What are the consequences of differing levels of subnational resilience for legitimacy and accountability in crisis management? By foregrounding regional executives, the paper aims to enrich existing debates on the institutional transformations of executive governance in light of numerous crises, which too often treat the subnational tier as either a passive implementer or an administrative extension of EU Member States. Theoretically, the paper draws on neo-institutionalism, multi-level governance approaches, and the concept of response diversity to explain how regional administrations anticipate, manage, and recover from natural disasters. These perspectives help to illuminate how institutionalized rules, intergovernmental relationships, and the heterogeneity of regional capacities generate variation in crisis performance. The analysis emphasizes that resilience is not solely a function of hazard exposure and policy design, but also of the systemic properties of the multi-level polity in which subnational executives operate. Empirically, the paper employs a comparative case-study design examining six recent natural disasters across Germany, Spain, and France: the 2021 Ahr flood and 2022 Treuenbrietzen wildfire in Germany; the 2024 Valencia flood and 2025 Extremadura wildfire in Spain; and the 2025 floods in Normandie and Bretagne along with the 2025 Aude wildfire in France. Data are drawn from interviews with subnational and EU officials, participatory observations, and extensive document analysis, including meeting minutes, position papers, draft laws, and media reports. The findings suggest that, beyond regulatory frameworks and situational crisis characteristics, systemic and institutional features within the EU multi-level system significantly shape and transform subnational preparedness and resilience. These include fiscal and administrative capacities, public–private actor constellations, and patterns of coordination with national governments and EU institutions. The paper concludes that variation in subnational resilience has important implications for democratic legitimacy and accountability, raising critical questions about the equitable and effective governance of natural disasters in an increasingly interdependent Europe.