Abstract
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. As a consequence, member states’ expectations towards the steering capacity of the European Council, the Commission, and the Council, as the EU’s three core executive institutions, have increased. 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. By re-joining public administration scholarship and EU studies approaches this paper analyses mechanisms of cross-sectoral leadership and coordination in the inter-institutional relations of the three core executive institutions. The paper proposes a conceptual framework for studying 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. It is argued 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 thus triggers changes in the EU’s political system and day-today decision-making practices. The paper presents first empirical 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. The leadership roles of the European Council and the Commission presidency are central in relation to cross-sectoral policy challenges. Because of the sectoral structure of the Council, Coreper has acquired new importance too. The interplay of the different levels of decision-making and wider inter-institutional relations are being both determined by the cross-sectoral character of major policy challenges, as known from public administration scholarship, and by changing patterns in day-to-day EU institutional politics, which are being typically analysed by EU studies scholars.
The paper is co-authored by Uwe Puetter and Chiara Terranova.
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