Themes: Introduction

The TransCrisis project answers this question by studying what crisis management capacities the EU has and how political leaders have made use of these crisis management capacities. Our analysis will play out along three dimensions:

• The crisis management capacity of EU institutions (including Commission, Council, EU agencies and the European Parliament)
• The capacity of individual political leaders to effectively and legitimately employ these institutional resources in concert
• The interaction across levels: between the EU level and efforts at the national level

This project is guided by a uniquely suited framework, which studies both governance capacity needed to fulfil key crisis management tasks and the particular leadership challenges that accompany these tasks. This analytical framework has been developed to study crisis management at the national level and has proven very effective, but it has rarely been used to analyze transboundary crisis management. This framework informs transboundary crisis management at the EU level, while considering its effects on the legitimacy of the EU and its institutions.