Political Conditionality as a Strategy of Subsidy Administration

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Martin Burgi
• Subject Area: Public Law
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 461214278

Over many years, the European Union and in particular its member state Germany have recorded high, and in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic once again signifi-cantly increased, subsidies to commercial enterprises. These subsidies are intended to maintain and improve the economic strength of the respective economies, but can also serve as a tool for pursuing additional public objectives, in particular ecological (e.g., more economical use of resources) and social (e.g., "good work", gender equality at the top management levels) goals. For politicians and administrators, this opens up new potentials for control and steering that is only just beginning to be ex-ploited. Up to now, the coupling of certain (additional) public objectives with the actu-al purpose of the subsidy has taken place rather coincidental and occasional. How-ever, demands to do so are increasing, and given the financial dimension of the re-spective subsidies, it is likely that a public strategy will emerge from this. I suggest to analysis this public strategy under the heading of "political conditionality".Legal scholarship must conceptualize and systematically evaluate this strategy and explore its compatibility with European law, German constitutional law, and the gen-eral principles of administrative law. The research project also addresses existing and potential implementation, supervision, and sanctioning mechanisms. By as-sessing the strengths and weaknesses of the strategy of political conditionality, the potentials of this strategy must be made transparent, but also its shortcomings have to be identified. Therefore, the first step of the research projects will consist of com-piling the existing data regarding the experiences with political conditionality in the area of public administration. The final objective of the project will be to generate drafting and framing proposals, which subsidizing administrators and legislators on the European and on the German level can make use of in practice. European re-gional and structural funds are a particularly important field of application. In terms of thematic coverage, the research project addresses above all those policy areas, in which subsidies play an important role, namely climate protection, pandemic man-agement, digitalization, and the establishment of equal living conditions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants