Rebuilding governance and resilience out of the pandemic

Culminating more than a decade of crisis in Europe, the Covid-19 pandemic has opened an unprecedented window of opportunity for institutional and policy change, not only at the “reactive” level of emergency responses, but also to tackle more broadly the many socio-political challenges caused or exacerbated by Covid-19. Building on this premise, REGROUP (Rebuilding governance and resilience out of the pandemic) aims to: 1) provide the European Union with a body of actionable advice on how to rebuild post-pandemic governance and public policies in an effective and democratic way; anchored to 2) a map of the socio-political dynamics and consequences of Covid-19; and 3) an empirically-informed normative evaluation of the pandemic. REGROUP pursues this threefold objective via a multi-level (national, supranational, international) and multi-sphere (political, societal, ideational, digital) research approach, and guided by three overarching analytical themes: “reordering”; “risk”; “resilience”. We operate in nine collaborative work packages—grouped in three blocks: “diagnosis”, “evaluation”, and “prescription”—bringing together expertise and methods from a range of social sciences and humanities. Doing so, we advance the state of the art conceptually, theoretically, and methodologically. REGROUP is conducted by a consortium of 13 internationally renowned institutions, committed to scholarly excellence, inclusiveness, and open science. The project is designed to achieve a high degree of policy, societal, and scientific impact, which it will achieve via a multi-pronged dissemination and communication strategy. This includes links to some of the EU’s main debates and events, such as the Health Union, the Green Deal, the Digital Decade, the Economic Governance Review, the Conference on the Future of Europe, and the 2024 European Parliament elections.