Collective Policy Learning in EU Financial Assistance: Insights from the Euro Crisis and Covid-19

This article examines policy change in the EU's financial assistance regime through a collective learning perspective. By defin-ing a financial assistance regime as the set of rules governing the disbursement and withdrawal of funding to the mem-ber states in the context of crisis management, the article seeks to address the following research question: How can we explain the exact form of change in the EU's financial assistance regime between the euro crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic? The article finds that financial assistance in the EU moved from "intergovernmental coordination" with the European Stability Mechanism to a form of "limited supranational delegation" with the Recovery and Resilience Facility and argues that such a change is due to a collective policy-learning process. This finding suggests that the EU tends to learn from past crisis experiences, freeing itself from established institutional constraints, only when the next crisis becomes a concrete cause for concern. However, when the next crisis strikes, the EU is indeed able to radically alter its practices based on previous policy failures.