Europeanisation of Crisis Management Governance: is the EU Making a Difference?

Natural hazards, such as earthquakes, floods, storms, are few examples of events that put our societies at risk. States have formulated their own risk assessments and have in place their own civil protection systems to manage them. However, crises that unfold from these hazards are increasingly not confined by national borders and call for a crisis management that goes beyond states. In this respect, the EU has taken several initiatives at legislative and judicial level in establishing common forms of cooperation and understanding of risk and crisis management among the member states and the associated countries (see Boin, Ekengren and Rhinard 2013), such as the EU Civil Protection Mechanism. In this paper, I aim to analyse, through the lenses of Europeanisation, the EU governance of crisis management and, more specifically the EU Civil Protection Mechanism, which sees the participation of all the member states and Iceland, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Norway, Serbia and Turkey. My research will focus on two processes: to what extent EU policies, institutions, and political choices in civil protection have had an impact on the domestic governance of crisis management, but also to what extent the domestic governance of crisis management contributes to the development of the above-mentioned policies and choices. My data will stem from document analysis and semi-structured interviews with civil protection officers at national and EU levels.