A decade of continuous crisis – Eurozone crisis, migration crisis, Brexit, Covid-19, invasion of Ukraine, energy crisis – has greatly enhanced the power and political authority of the European leaders. Yet, existing research continued to focus on the spotlight moments and headline decisions of the leaders themselves, instead of looking at the institutional and national machineries that manage the entire process.
Over the past five years, the Chefsache project worked intensively with insiders from the EU institutions: President of the European Council, General Secretariat of the Council, European Commission, and various Dutch ministries: Ministries of Finance, Economic Affairs, Justice and Security, Foreign Affairs, Permanent Representation of the Netherlands to the European Union. The project sought both to assess and to support the machinery that produced Europe’s main crisis responses. Researchers were embedded in central units of these organisations, both at EU and at the national level, to provide real-time, insider analyses, a.o. of the coming about of the Next Generation EU package, the EU responses to the energy crisis, the Migration Pact, the European Green deal and fit-for-55 packages. The team hosted a series of participatory gaming workshops and facilitative modelling sessions in these organisations. These sessions served to model the characteristics of decision-making situations, and to help participants determine their strategies for subsequent negotiations. This approach was used a.o. to inform and support the approaches of the Dutch negotiating teams in the decision-making on the reform of the EU Stability and Growth Pact (‘Economic Governance Review’) and in the reform of the EU migration regime (‘Migration Pact’).
The Chefsache project also provided an important methodological contribution, by developing and pioneering the method of Embedded Process Tracing, which combines mainstream causal process tracing techniques with elements from interpretivist and ethnographic approaches to provide contextualised and particularised analyses of a social system. The EPT method provided the basis for various research panels and a full-week PhD level methods course at the Methods.net Summer School in Social Research Methods in 2024.