The realisation of NextGenerationEU: taking stock of the Recovery and Resilience Facility

This article examines the rich literature on the European Union’s Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), the central instrument of the NextGenerationEU (NGEU) recovery plan created in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Worth up to €806.9 bn, NGEU, and the RRF (€577 bn) in particular, represents the most ambitious fiscal intervention in the EU’s history. The article systematises the scholarship on the RRF to clarify its implications for European integration, fiscal governance, and EU policy implementation. It argues that the RRF constitutes a major innovation that combines large-scale common borrowing with significant financial transfers to member states and a novel governance architecture linking EU priorities to national reform and investment plans. Reviewing multiple strands of EU studies and primary documents, the article highlights how the RRF strengthened the European Commission’s executive role, introduced performance-based conditionality, and reshaped interinstitutional relations between Brussels and the member states. The findings suggest that the RRF challenges established EU integration theories: it neither fully aligns with intergovernmentalism nor neofunctionalism, instead reflecting what has been referred to as constrained supranationalism and coordinative Europeanisation. As academic and policy debates on the RRF’s funding and disbursement architecture have matured, attention should now shift towards its longer-term legacy and implications.