Governing Europe's Recovery and Resilience Facility: between discipline and discretion

With the launch of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), the Commission has been put in the driving seat to steer and monitor the national plans. In this task, the Commission is mandated to guarantee that the reforms and investments within the recovery plans are in line with the Country Specific Recommendations. Whether the Commission will be able to accomplish this task, however, remains an open question. The Commission will indeed have to strike a balance between the necessity on the one hand to ensure discipline in the CSRs' implementation and on the other hand not to stop the implementation of the investments included in the plans. In the meantime, member states will exert their political pressure on the Commission to ensure that the RRF meets the conflicting expectations that were created in the respective national constituencies. Indeed, while some leaders have stressed the RRF nature as an investment strategy, others have promised their parliaments that the instrument is all about structural reform. Taking insights from the political economy of structural reforms and policy learning literature, the purpose of this paper is thus to investigate how the Commission has dealt with these choices in the first stages of the RRF, namely the drafting of the national plans. We do so by looking at the pre-drafting negotiations in four case studies: Italy, Croatia, Germany and the Netherlands. On the basis of elite interviews and a close reading of the documents we try to answer the questions of how the Commission has used its enhanced monitoring capacities in the RRF and whether this leads to more hierarchical steering?