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The European response to COVID-19 has revealed an inconvenient truth. Despite having integrated public health concerns across all its policies – be it agriculture, consumer protection, or security –, the Union cannot directly act to save people’s lives. Only member states can do so. Yet when they adopted unilateral measures to counter the spread of the virus, those proved not only ineffective but also disruptive on vital supply chains, by ultimately preventing the flow of essential goods and people across the Union. These fragmented efforts in tackling cross-border health threats have almost immediately prompted political calls for the urgent creation of a European Health Union. Yet this call raises more questions than answers. With the aim to offer a rigorous and timely blueprint to decision-makers and the public at large, this Special Issue of the European Journal of Risk Regulation contextualizes such a new political project within the broader constitutional and institutional framework of EU public health law and policy. By introducing the Special, this paper argues that unless the envisaged Health Union will tackle the root causes of what prevented the Union from effectively responding to COVID-19 – the divergent health capacity across the Union –, it might fall short of its declared objective of strengthening the EU’resilience for cross-border health threats.

Ten years after the introduction of participatory democracy as one of the democratic foundations of the European Union, this introductory chapter to "Citizen Participation in Democratic Europe" provides some theoretical background on the role citizens play, and should play, within the EU democratic system. As such, it offers a contribution about the place of citizen participation in the wider, ongoing debate about how to develop the EU’s democratic system in a post-pandemic Europe. It sets the scene for the subsequent chapters written, again, not only by academic scholars but also civil society advocates and practitioners from across Europe who experience on a daily basis the realities of EU citizen participation. Ultimately, this edited volume argues how Europe’s long-standing democracy challenge can be addressed through the emergence of a new model of EU citizen participation, and a set of democratic innovations emerging bottom-up across the continent. To do so, it offers a re-evaluation and systematisation of EU level citizen participation and its future development, which remains largely underexplored.

Recent contributions in the domains of governance and regulation elucidate the importance of rule-intermediation (RI), the role that organizations adopt to bridge actors playing regulatory or “rule-making” (RM) roles, and those adopting target or “rule-taking” (RT) roles. Intermediation not only enables diffusion and translation of regulatory norms, but also allows for the representation of different actors in policy-making arenas. While prior studies have explored the roles that such RIs adopt to facilitate their intermediation functions, we have yet to consider how field-level structuring processes influence (and are influenced by) the various and changing roles adopted by RIs. In this study, we focus on the mutually constitutive relations between field-level change processes and the evolving roles of RIs by studying the rise of ICLEI (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives/Local Governments for Sustainability), an RI serving as a bridge for sustainable urban development policies between the United Nations and urban authorities. Using ICLEI as an illustrate case, we theorize four different processes of regulatory field consolidation and fragmentation including: problematization, role specialization, marketization and orchestrated decentralization. We discuss their implications for the RI roles in the field and further theorize the changing dynamics of trickle-up intermediation processes as an RI gains power and influence. This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Bothello, J. and Mehrpouya, A. (2018), Between regulatory field structuring and organizational roles: Intermediation in the field of sustainable urban development. Regulation & Governance, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/rego.12215. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions.

This time was supposed 'to be different', at least this was the motto of the 2014 European Parliament elections campaign. With less than a year before the next European elections, the time is ripe to examine how different this EU political cycle has actually been. Emboldened by the Spitzenkandidaten process – which established for the first time a link between the outcome of the EU elections and the presidency of the EU Commission –, the Juncker Commission emerged as the most political yet. To shrug off the label of technocratic institution – historically insulated from citizens’ preferences –, the new Commission asked EU citizens to judge its operation by its ability ‘to deliver solutions to the big issues that cannot be addressed by the Member States alone’. While the Better Regulation Agenda might have improved the Commission’s public accountability – with both citizens and stakeholders being better informed about and engaged with EU policy-making –, without however increasing its responsiveness to public preferences. This is the case at the input, throughput and output stage. Rather, the techno-political approach to policymaking – which characterizes the Juncker’s Better Regulation – might have paradoxically led to a compression of participatory democracy and somehow chilled stakeholder engagement. At a time of unprecedented contestation of the EU project – a trend which is combined by a record-demand for new forms of political representation –, it appears paradoxical that the EU – an early promoter of participation – is missing out the chance to seize the momentum to diversify and redesign its participatory structures being busy delivering on its electoral promises no one will ever judge.At the very same time the Juncker Commission has been striving to develop its own, autonomous democratic credentials, its choice to embrace a set of well-defined institutional mechanisms that reward expert judgment over political adjudication appears at odds with its newly-acquired political nature.