Teaching - Geschwister-Scholl-Institute of Political Science (GSI) at the LMU Munich, Germany
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What Happened with EU Money? Member States in the Final Year of the COVID-19 Recovery and Resilience Facility
MA seminar
October 2025 - February 2026, Thursdays, 10-12h
First class: 16 October 2025
Last class: 5 February 2026
Venue: GSI, Oettingenstraße 67, 80538 Munich
Room 161
The Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), adopted in 2021 to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, has been the largest transfer policy in the history of the European Union (EU)—€723.8 billion of common ‘EU money’ raised on financial markets and distributed to the member states as loans and grants. The RRF ends in August 2026.
This seminar examines how successful member states have been in managing the RRF money, and what domestic governance they have set up to do so. Was the governance only a national decision or was there also some influence by the EU? As part of a Europeanization of national fiscal administrations, did a similar governance to manage EU money emerge in different countries? This would have important implications for the development of a European fiscal union.
Literature:
Ladi, S., Tsarouhas, D. & Copeland, P. (2025). Negotiating the recovery and resilience facility: the emergence of coordinative conditionality. Comparative European Politics, 23, 18–39.
Zeitlin, J., Bokhorst, D., & Eihmanis, E. (2025). Governing the European Union's recovery and resilience facility: National ownership and performance-based financing in theory and practice. Regulation & Governance.
Knill, C. (2001). The Europeanization of National Administrations. Patterns of Institutional Change and Persistence. Cambridge University Press.
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Office hours
Office hours take place during the teaching term (16 October 2025 - 5 February 2026) from 12:30h to 13:30h in my office (room 174) or online via this Zoom link.
The passcode to enter the Zoom room will be sent separately per e-mail.
There are 4 slots available for each office hour. One student meeting can last up to 15 minutes.
To attend office hours, you need to send me an e-mail at tiziano.zgaga@gsi.lmu.de at least 1 day before. You can e-mail me in English, German, or Italian.
If you cannot attend, please e-mail me or inform me in class, in order to allow somebody else to take the slot. If there is anything in writing we need to discuss, please send it to me until midnight the day before the meeting, otherwise I will not be able to read it. Please send longer files at least one week in advance. ​
If you need to e-mail me, please make sure your message is as brief as possible, contains a clearly formulated question and subject line, and follows standard e-mail etiquette.
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