Competence, Control, and Joint Procurement in the EU

When will EU member states centralize public procurement at the EU level? Public procurement refers to purchases of governance resources by governments and other public bodies. The scope of public procurement is large covering a broad range of goods and services from fuels and IT equipment to large-scale infrastructures and weapon systems. While usually considered the province of national governments, the recent string of crises has drawn attention to the desirability, or indeed the need, of pooling public purchases at the EU level, to safeguard, for instance, a sufficient supply of Covid vaccines or energy resources for all. Yet, joint procurement is not a new idea. As even a cursory look at the historical record reveals, joint purchases have been since the 1950s. However, the institutions, procedures, and performance of joint procurement have differed widely ranging from outright rejection (e.g. joint energy purchases in the 1970s) to mostly symbolical provisions (e.g. the Euratom Supply Agency), failed attempts (joint procurement of artillery shells 2023) to fairly effective arrangements (vaccine procurement during the Covid pandemic). 

The project analyses the creation, configuration, and use of instruments of joint procurement in the EU. It traces the emergence (and phasing out) of EU procurement instruments empirically over time (1957-2022) and across sectors. It accounts for variance in the creation, configuration, and use of procurement instruments theoretically based on the competence-control framework. It combines observational and experimental, and quantitative and qualitative approaches perspective analytically in a mixed-methods design.  

Project team:

Prof. Dr. Philipp Genschel

Jule Meyer

Adam Vittek