From Crisis to Capacity: Comparing Subnational Crisis Governance and Resilience Building in the EU

The proliferation of environmental crises and increasingly transboundary natural disasters has rendered crisis management and resilience building central challenges for governance in 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 growing urgency of strengthening coordinated responses across all levels of government. In contexts of multiple and overlapping crises, these developments highlight the pivotal role of subnational executives in crisis decision-making, institutional adaptation, and the effective governance of natural hazards within the EU’s multi-level system. Despite this heightened policy attention, political science research on EU crisis governance continues to focus 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 practices and resilience-building capacities of regional authorities comparatively underexplored. This paper addresses this gap by examining convergence and divergence in subnational crisis governance across the European multilevel disaster management system. It asks two core questions: (1) Which institutional, political, and administrative 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? The paper contributes to debates on governance transformation in times of crisis by foregrounding regional executives as active political actors rather than passive implementers of national or EU policies. 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 illuminate how institutionalized rules, intergovernmental relations, and heterogeneous state capacities shape crisis responses and patterns of institutional adaptation. Resilience is thus conceptualized not merely as a function of hazard exposure or policy design, but as an emergent property of crisis governance within a complex multi-level system. 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 semi-structured interviews with subnational and EU officials, participatory observations, and extensive document analysis, including meeting minutes, position papers, draft laws, and media reports. The findings demonstrate that beyond regulatory frameworks and situational crisis characteristics, systemic features of EU multi-level governance – such as fiscal and administrative capacities, executive-legislative relations, public–private actor constellations, and patterns of intergovernmental coordination – significantly shape subnational preparedness, crisis response, and learning. Variation in subnational resilience, in turn, has profound consequences for policy legitimacy and accountability, raising critical questions about the equitable and democratic governance of crises in an increasingly interdependent Europe.