The development of EU health policy and the Covid-19 pandemic: trends and implications

ABSTRACT

EU health policy is a policy forged in crisis. Whilst maintaining the strict limitations on the EU’s role that are described in the treaties, crises have historically been followed by incremental but integrative policy change. Given this trend, should we be expecting a radical expansion of EU health policy in the aftermath of Covid-19? And, if so, what parameters and characteristics might this new agenda have? As we enter the period in which the EU will try to elaborate its new health policy, this paper uses a Complexity perspective to assess how the emerging agenda compares to existing and historical EU action on health, the kind of decision-making that we are likely to see in the different areas of action, and the limitations of EU health policy development as it pushes into more political and complex areas of policy.

KEYWORDS:

• EU health policy
• complexity
• policy agenda
• Covid-19

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge collaborative work on the EU’s Covid-19 response, undertaken with Scott L. Greer (Michigan) and Anniek de Ruijter (Amsterdam), which underpins parts of section one. Any errors remain with the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For the Commission, action is generally led by the relevant units within the Health and Food Safety Directorate, DG Santé.

2. A further amendment, made in April 2020, created the first RescEU stockpile of equipment relevant specifically to public health crises, including ventilators, PPE and basic medicines.

3. The €9.4 billion health budget originally proposed by the Commission was cut by the European Council in July to €1.7 billion. The EU legislature reached provisional agreement on the new budget on 10 November 2020, but this is still to be formally adopted by the European Council and European Parliament.

4. The Complexity Diagram – also called a Stacey Diagram/Matrix – was developed by Ralph Stacey in the early 1990s (Stacey 1993).Stacey later distanced himself from it over concerns that it was too limiting; see Stacey, Griffin and Shaw (2002) However, the diagram remains popular in a number of Complexity-related academic areas.

5. This discussion of the Complexity Diagram is based on Webb and Geyer (2020).