Hamilton Goes Green: The EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility to Combat Climate Change

The response to the Covid pandemic has been heralded as a Hamiltonian moment for the European Union’s constitutional architecture. By way of innovative financing, the Recovery and Resilience Facility makes available unprecedented sums to achieve climate neutrality in 2050. To this end, Member States submit recovery and resilience plans to the Commission, which should address challenges identified in the European Semester and the Country-Specific Recommendations. Subsequently, the Council approves this plan and during the implementation there is a possibility to seize the European Council in an emergency break procedure if there are serious deviations from the plan. This contribution will examine the institutional setup of the Recovery and Resilience Facility and how it fared after one year in action. It will uncover how newly devised decision-making procedures build upon the existing constitutional framework of economic governance and help propel the European project towards green transition. To this end, this contribution will briefly recall how Alexander Hamilton’s lasting message for the 21st century that public authorities may and should help bring about the green transition (II.). The Recovery and Resilience Facility stands out as the most important programme in this regard (III.) and has a unique governance system for not only approving recovery and resilience plans, but also in the implementation of these plans (IV.). Moreover, the Recovery and Resilience Facility is tightly integrated into the European Semester and the broader scope of multilateral surveillance (V.). This allows to draw some conclusions about the importance of the European Union to help combat climate change (VI.).