Varieties of EU Joint Procurement

What is joint procurement? In 2024, special advisors Draghi, Letta and Niinistö published three well publicized reports on what the EU should do to improve productivity, regain competitiveness, and hold its geopolitical ground. One key proposal was to move to more joint procurement in strategic sectors. Joint procurement, it was claimed, would increase efficiency, self-sufficiency and competitiveness by facilitating industrial consolidation and economies of scale. Yet, the practical meaning of joint procurement remained fuzzy. What does it entail and how does it work? We analyze a sample of recent cases in the sectors of health, defense, energy and space to identify common features and sources of variance. We find that the range of variation is great, extending from opening national procurement processes to European competition, to fully centralizing procurement decision-making and funding at the European level. We propose a typology of joint procurement mechanisms, and map types of joint procurement processes across policy fields. We find that joint procurement arrangements differ in decision-making rules, funding structures, and ownership of procurement assets. There is also large variance in the frequency and scale with which these arrangements are actually used. While the procurement of Covid-19 vaccines was a very large-scale operation, the role of joint procurement in the defense sector is often ceremonial. The proposed typology challenges the assumption that joint procurement follows a uniform model and instead demonstrates how its structure is adapted to different policy areas. In this way, it can serve as a conceptual framework for a more systematic approach to further research on this topic, allowing for generating of hypotheses and theory testing in specific cases.