Subsidiarity as an economic governance model for the EU

Adriaan Schout

Chapter 3 in Handbook of European Union Governance, 2025, pp 38-53 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: An organizational approach to subsidiarity reveals that economic governance within the EU is not about delegating tasks but about structuring and managing economic interdependencies between member states. It also has important implications for the EU Commission's role as an agent of economic governance. Consequently, subsidiarity is treated as an organizational principle for understanding EU economic governance. The first section argues that understanding subsidiarity requires a cross-disciplinary approach, even though some consider subsidiarity to be a technocratic notion with little practical relevance. The next section presents subsidiarity as equivalent to decentralization in the organizational science literature and argues that subsidiarity/decentralization requires simultaneous recentralization. The discussion then turns to subsidiarity as the lens for explaining why some EU policy areas succeed while other equally complex and dynamic policy areas fail. This then allows, in the final section, the mapping of subsidiarity in a comparative framework by distinguishing between European integration and European cooperation.

Keywords: Subsidiarity; EU deficit management; Eurocrisis; Governance; Kompetenzkatalog (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781803925172
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