Funding as a tool in administrative law: EU structural funds as a case study

Money and funding are powerful instruments, enabling regulators and administrators to ‘wheedle, coax and threaten’ actors to effect policy changes. Despite this, scholars of administrative law have given limited consideration to funding mechanisms in general and structural funds in particular – the latter encompassing the majority of the funds disbursed by the EU. We argue in this chapter that the realm of funding mechanisms is where administrative powers are increasingly exercised. The chapter provides an overview of the EU legal framework governing the management of the structural funds and traces its chronological evolution. Funding mechanisms are adopted by a diverse array of public and private, individual, and collective actors at various levels of governance, and are implemented through multi-step processes such as planning, evaluation, and monitoring. For administrative lawyers, funding raises pertinent questions for comparative administrative law, including issues of participation, transparency, accountability, and access to justice.