What determines the ability of European Union executive institutions to address major contemporary cross-sectoral policy challenges?

The European Union (EU) has been entrusted with ever greater roles in replying to major contemporary cross-sectoral policy challenges. These include the fight against climate change, the war in Ukraine, migration, the response to Covid-19 or digitalisation. In all areas the EU has become involved in complex processes of cross-sectoral policy adjustment. Member states’ expectations towards the policy-making roles of the European Council, the Commission, and the Council, as the EU’s three core executive institutions, have increased ever since the advent of the euro crisis at the end of the first decade of the 2000s. Even though the problem of cross-sectoral policy coordination is well-known to public administration scholars in general, there is still demand for more systematic and comparative research. Moreover, cross-sectoral coordination might be even more difficult to achieve in the EU’s multilevel governance system, which requires a permanent focus on horizontal and vertical coordination across the various levels of authority. Studies of EU politics so far have almost exclusively focused on this latter aspect – conceiving policy-making mainly as a challenge of finding agreement among member states, as well as between the latter and EU institutions. EU policy studies, instead, have made important advances in understanding examples of policy integration across sectors. Yet, policy scholars lack sufficient insights into the politics of EU cross-sectoral coordination, notably into the question of political leadership. By re-joining public administration scholarship and EU studies approaches this paper argues that analysing the emergence of political leadership in the inter-institutional relations of the three core executive institutions is crucial for understanding cross-sectoral coordination in the EU’s multilevel governance system. Therefore, the paper proposes a new framework for conceptual access to the study of the ability of the EU’s core executive institutions to adjust and control responses to major contemporary policy challenges across sectoral boundaries, over time and simultaneously. The paper hypothesises that EU institutions face structural obstacles in handling cross-sectoral coordination as they have been originally designed to solve political disagreements within a multilevel governance context in a sector-specific manner. The growing importance of cross-sectoral policy challenges contradicts this institutional logic, thus triggering changes in the EU’s political system and day-to-day decision-making practices. The presented research provides first empirical evidence that EU executive institutions have changed their working methods and patterns of interaction in response to increasing quests for cross-sectoral leadership at the EU-level in conjunction with almost all major contemporary policy challenges. Notably, the leadership role of the European Council has been expanded significantly. Changes affect both the political dimension of the relations between the three core executive institutions as well as administrative support processes. The paper illustrates this argument in relation to the EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the fight against climate change.